Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me

The woman told me the saddest thing I had ever heard. I told her I loved her because of what she had told me. Her expression soured. She warned me not to love her for her tellin

The woman told me the saddest thing I had ever heard. I told her I loved her because of what she had told me. Her expression soured. She warned me not to love her for her telling me that. She told me it was okay, and maybe even good, to love her – only not for that. I responded that I did not love her for that, exactly, and that she had misunderstood me. I admitted that why I loved her was related to what she had told me, yes, but only tangentially, and was that alright? She asked me to elaborate, so I told her that I loved her, not for the thing she had told me, but for the courage involved in telling someone something like it, something that sad, which seemed to me to be a great deal of courage – and I told her I also loved her, though far less than for the courage part, although plenty still, for the way in which she told it to me, which I explained had been, in all seriousness, eloquent and mesmerizing. She had a small build and at that point she laughed like a flower, wilting and blooming. Her nose was in the center. I decided to show her the river. I picked her up in my hands and carried her, crisscrossing back and down through the steep and elaborate cragwork of the slope of the riverbank. When my feet were finally in the water I looked at her and said, the river is deep, and fast, and it drowns many people, but I still love it. I still love the river, I told her. But I do not love it because it is deep, and fast, and drowns many people. I love it because it runs behind my house, and I have lived above it forever.

It's like cutting your hand on a piece of metal during sex.

It's like punishment meted out at night by a giant tractor.

It's like losing at chess to a caveman.

It's like a caveman losing at chess to a dinosaur.

It's like a dinosaur losing at chess to a primeval forest ... losing at chess to a primeval star.

It's like punching your children to a tune.

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door. ...

Forgive me,
the grand finale is going to be
a final, grand simile:

Talent is to honesty what love
is to gossip, if we are poetry.
Or is it, talent is to honesty in poetry
what gossip in poetry is to love in life?
I don’t even care. Okay, really,
this is going to be over soon. I want a million dollars,
and you, but I would take either.
But I would rather have you,
and if gossip moves through love
like money through time, I basically do.

I am leaving, but like the leopard on the branch,
and a daunting number of other things,
you are looking at me again,
and so the poem will continue, like gossip.

time almost stops moving
as my pants magically lower

like a Niagara Falls of Levis.
You drip like a ship of physical aristocracy

Your undercarriage is drizzling stars
We make love like a church burning down

in the imagination of a eunuch
then flee together out of simile into you.

When we climax together I tell you I love you
but it comes out, "I hate language."