Love and Other Poems. Alex Dimitrov

      LIVING ON EARTH

      Part of the celestial sky known as the sea.

      Where there’s little of Earth

      and nothing of us as these forms.

      In the animal soup of time beside the Water Bearer

      and the Great River. They’re up there for the lost

      with Polaris. In the oceans. At home.

      In your own body which is mostly water

      and mostly not yours. Not even tonight

      while you’re in it. When another body

      sleeps alongside all your want.

      What does the moon know of our language,

      our care for its perceived loneliness

      which may be its one joy.

      Where would you find love if not on the earth?

      As if we should be permitted elsewhere.

      As if we understand our own wars,

      our reasons for fleeing, forgetting—

      the history we do not allow ourselves to imagine

      and the lives we refuse to know,

      which are often our own. I think of you here,

      where you haven’t been in years.

      There’s a flaw in the wood of the door

      or my own madness that welcomes the wind

      although it is summer, although I am winter.

      You could see the sea from the desert

      on a night when no one comes to harm you,

      an evening when bombs go off somewhere as planned.

      We could be letters. Sent here

      to warn each other of a much better time.

      We could be no one. And for nothing.

      For what?

      DARK MATTER

      The living looking for eternity

      don’t know eternity is brief.

      A favorite thing about being alive

      or other questions no one asks me,

      and it would be knowing people.

      Knowledge through time.

      What’s the name of that hour in the day

      where no matter our planned futures

      everything is full of nothing

      as the world is full of people

      without reason other than small chance.

      You are tired and most singular

      in the middle of the afternoon

      when seeing you on the street

      (and not in a bedroom) reminds me you’re real,

      allowing me to begin the rest of this poem.

      Because life isn’t enough

      which is unbelievable to the fog, sea,

      or anything lucky to be

      without our incurable consciousness.

      Vanishing. A once-orange leaf that’s been

      left in a book. The silver handles

      of the casket as it’s lowered into the earth.

      People’s mistakes. Dark matter.

      The sky just before evening.

      One boat in the Atlantic.

      A handful of balloons going all the way up.

      The few places in the world where it’s raining

      as you read this. As I write this.

      As I read this out loud and somewhere

      what is expected does not return.

      The last lamp in an old house.

      How I’m not sure if I’d like to end on an image

      of someone turning it on, turning it off.

      Silences. Between the waves and beneath them.

      People’s mistakes. People’s mistakes.

      1969

      The summer everyone left for the moon

      even those yet to be born. And the dead

      who can’t vacation here but met us all there

      by the veil between worlds. The No. 1 song

      in America was “In the Year 2525”

      because who has ever lived in the present

      when there’s so much of the future

      to continue without us.

      How the best lover won’t need to forgive you

      and surely take everything off your hands

      without having to ask, without knowing

      your name, no matter the number of times

      you married or didn’t, your favorite midnight movie,

      the cigarettes you couldn’t give up,

      wanting to kiss other people you shouldn’t

      and now to forever be kissed by the earth.

      In the earth. With the earth.

      When we all briefly left it

      to look back on each other from above,

      shocked by how bright even our pain is

      running wildly beside us like an underground river.

      And whatever language is good for,

      a sign, a message left up there that reads:

      “Here men from planet Earth first set foot

      upon the moon, July 1969 A.D.

      We came in peace for all mankind.”

      Then returned to continue the war.

      WAITING AT STONEWALL

      It’s a Friday in New York

      and fifty years from ’69.

      Though since we’ve yet to meet

      or have, and are still looking,

      what we’ve said to each other

      in photos and films, bars

      and basements, returns

      with enough echo

      to remind us of ourselves.

      Those of us who resisted heroes

      and sentiment. Those of us

      who waited and found neither—

      not the promised liberation

      in marriage, or the salvation

      of laws. How some asked

      to carry America’s guns

      and did. How others knew

      equality was a rumor,

      elusive as freedom or sex.

      Do you think