Love. . . for the Blog Carnival

This week's Blog Carnival, sponsored by Peter Pollock of "Rediscovering the Church", and Bridget Chumbley of "One Word at a Time", takes as its prompt the word "love". Below is my offering, a story of an early, once-was love. You will find others' contributions, which will be added throughout the day, here at Bridget's place.

Four Poems of Love

I

I came to you a woman
filled with love unfinished
on that cold night, our first March together.
The burdens in my eyes interrupted
a slowed and softer moment just beyond us.
You understood at once my own and deeper meaning.
Gently you held my tears
against the moonlight, dropping them later
in the darkness one by one over and over.
Trembling, I turned to you who then traced my lifeline
in your now familiar secret.
And this I became: A place to go
outside myself.

II

Lying at your side
I watch you sleep:
your generous mouth a happy conversation
your eyes an accident of pleasure.
Your ruffled hair is damp against my pillow
your breath, a motioned and satisfied intrusion.
In the half-light of morning
I look for the difference,
the trace of a story: beginning and end.
I find instead your touch warm
unaware searching me out.

III

I wake in this bed you
are absent from only minutes ago.
The sheets unsmoothed and quiet
remind me now of poems discarded in your favor.
I reach for them, turning them back to life
with a hand unavoidably violent.
Their silence I pull from the white and empty space
you left them in.
Even without you, I make them the key to my heart,
showing them off in my eyes
I opened to you.

IV

Not somewhere else,
but here I would have you.
Where summer talks into fall
a same but colored truth
to play against my questions
you unbuild in a private place.
I tell you,
I'm no good at preventing this thing
that happens, that breaks this solitude
into still new days when you take my hand
and meet me halfway.

Copyright © 2009 Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved.