☀ Today's Poem: "Love" Margaret Ross

I always try to memorize his face
but I never can. I can say
he has a face, he has
a body, an apartment.

He has a bowl of ice water
where he soaks his hands
because of tendons in his fingers.

He has a plant with long leaves
on the ledge above his toilet.

Once when I was there
and he had left the room
I wrote on a scrap of paper in my wallet
he’s just a person
so I could read it
later, when I was home.

*

I wait where a dirt path through a meadow
lets out at a gravel patch beside the paved road.
The air smells heavy, opulent.
Before the place the redwoods start
are orchards. The story is
my car broke down and he’s
a stranger driving by.

Or I park on his street
and stand a minute gathering myself
behind the car. When I step out front, I’ll see him
blue-lit, sitting by the window typing.
He won’t hear me move until
I tap my knuckles to the glass.

It’s hard to look at him right away
so I look at the white stretch
of his t-shirt.

The nubby lattice
pattern of the rug.

I step off my heels.
He wants me to kneel in front
of a mirror and say my name
and point to every part
of me that’s his.

*

At a party, a stranger
wearing nothing but a fishing net
embraces me because he loves
my friend, who wears a matching net
with shiny lures taped to her nipples.
A person in a Pilgrim costume
tells me how the person on the sofa
saved her marriage by becoming
what she calls their third. She met
the person in the park, their daughters
had the same name.

*

When I ask him not to say my name
he thinks I’m saying names would feel
too close. They feel too distant.

He hands me the folded remnant
of a shirt he tore off me the week before.
I think you leave things here on purpose.
I didn’t leave that, it’s garbage.
You also left your hair thing.

Later, we watch a video of him
climb a cliff next to the ocean.
The day is cloudy, shadowless.
We watch his fingers feel out
angles on the rock and pull
his body higher.

Three thousand people
watched it before me.

From his bed
you see the dense crown
of a fig tree in the yard next door
where the tenant hung himself
last spring. Now blue tarp
curtains the house,
the landlord is renovating.

I feel a happiness so concentrated
it feels like fear.

*

He has a lamp he softens
when I come, draping his shirt
over the shade.

He has a winding blue-green
helix tattooed up his side.

On my way, I stop
at gas stations and stand in the bathroom
checking. If you say the feeling out loud
it sounds comic, disproportionate.
I press brown paper towel
to my forehead.

*

Sun covered the bed.
I lay listening to him moving
through the other room, hearing
water, hearing something
open, shut, then silence
then him coming nearer.

How do you get close to a person?
Once you got past pleasure
there was pain. No
there was pleasure turning
into something pain was
part of. If you can let them
hurt you deep enough, you’ll be
inside the other person.

Driving up nights on the freeway, dark fields
tearing by on either side, I practice
saying hi. Hi.