Love and Other Poems

by Alex Dimitrov

watching the downpour in what could be the middle of life;

I love that hour of the party when everyone’s settled into their discomfort and someone tells you something really important—in passing—because it’s too painful any other way.

I love voting though know art and not power is what changes human character.

I love that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year.

I love how magnified emotions are at airports.

I love that despite having one body there are many ways to live.

I love the nostalgia of the future.

It’s Sunday and the trains run on time but today death feels so far, it’s impossible to go underground. I would like to say something to everyone I see (an entire city) but I’m unsure what it is yet.

Again it’s the longest day of the year. What finds you assumes its place in the morning and stays.

At last it’s impossible to think of anything as I swim through the heat on Broadway and disappear in the Strand.

Outside New York continues to be New York.

To understand your body’s place in the order of living by the number of trips it makes around a star.

Despite all our work, even the worst of life has a place in memory. And the fixed hours between two and five before evening are the aimless future with someone who cannot stay new.

I am sadder than I look but happier than all the dead. And if you’ve seen how small we are in NASA’s photos, it’s impossible to think our happiness is that important.

The first disappointment. Which is not remembered but lives in the body.

All of which cannot prepare us for death of which I am a student and which is this country’s business: the permanence of others.

I continue to be that person who thinks enough of the future to let it into the foyer without opening the door.

Should we leave ourselves inside the longer nights we’d see it, even as the days feel once again like welcome obligation.

The dead too have each other to look for. Like the scent of late fire clinging to hair and the keys now finding their locks before we go in.

No later than now could we find an ending for what would have been rivers.

The most personal moment of the day appears unannounced.

Besides, who knows what to do with love? It may not make it through one cigarette. And it’s enough to kill you, how dark it is how cold we seem even in our own misery all while knowing we will miss this. We will miss this when it ends.

The edges of your life undressing and the actors who played you rehearsing lines that couldn’t bring you to love. Imagine the thankless highway with its signs and detours opening onto what may have been yours and is not. You waited.

The day I met you never ended for me.

There are people dying in emergency rooms and people in love every night before and after the feast of Saint Valentine.

Love is not a fraud but there are many rumors.

The Mystery—begins one headline— or why in looking for utopia on Earth over 900 people were led to mass suicide in 1978.

As to tell—of the seconds, minutes, stretches of time recorded between someone being pronounced dead and returning. What is referred to as Lazarus syndrome.

Where whatever we meant to become is minor. Is gone. Like the story of everyone who found fame and soon understood being known is almost enough.

And they congratulated themselves on their outrage in the new late capitalism.

It was Friday. It could have been any month. And it didn’t matter if we couldn’t get over anything. We weren’t the type to try.

The turn in the day when it’s no longer morning.

THE WEATHER OF OUR LIVES Had we known we were always in it?

What we can’t admit: how time together is an achievement how time together dulls passion.

The one origin when no pill was needed to live with decision. In the middle. The awful middle where we attend to our work without choice for the illusion of choices.

I would like to walk the moors without anyone. And open the window to ask for rain. And I love the rain.

It was supposed to be a different life, I kept reading about it. I kept telling people I slept with how soon we would know (even as dread became daily) exactly what to do with ourselves.

For you I will be a version of myself I hardly remember.

I used to prefer autumn but spring has made me an adult.

I stopped confusing my body for a weapon but my body has never impressed me.

I’ll leave you with a few thoughts on the imagination because the imagination is a wild thought and more honest than biography.