The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

Why am I not allowed delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts on suffering.

She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive.

I’m almost certain, though I am certain of nothing. There is a solitude in this world I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

The great eye of the world is both gaze and gloss. To be swallowed by being seen. A dream. To be made whole by being not a witness, but witnessed.

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why can’t I just love the flower for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how, even when simply living, these unearned moments are a tribute to the dead.

Distracted by the evidence of life at our feet, we had no time for the waiting that was required. To watch the waves until the whales surfaced seemed a maddening task. Now, I am in the inland air that smells of smoke and gasoline, the trees blown leafless by wind. Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?

see it is not one tree but two, and they are kissing. They are kissing so tenderly it feels rude to watch, one hand on the other’s shoulder, another in the other’s branches, like hair. When did kissing become so dangerous? Or was it always so?

I want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.

Borges lost his sight, over years, and yet sometimes it is best to be invisible. What is it to be seen in the right way? As who you are?

Mistral writes: I killed a woman in me: one I did not love. But I do not want to kill that longing woman in me. I love her and I want her to go on longing until it drives her mad, that longing, until her desire is something like a blazing flower, a tree shaking off the torrents of rain as if it is simply making music.

or just talking or not talking or being happy or not unhappy, and this is my secret work, to be worthy of you both and this infinite discourse where everything is interesting because you point it out and say, Isn’t that interesting? And how mostly we say, Remember that time, and we will nod because we do remember that time. Except for the few times we’ve forgotten, like that one time when H was trying to remind us of something and when we asked her what, she said, I don’t know, but you were there and I was there. And we were.

And so I have two brains now. Two entirely different brains. The one that always misses where I’m not, and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.

And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Lose my number, sadness. Lose my address, my storm door, my skull.

What is the other world that others live in? Unknown to me. The ease of grin and good times.

I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

It was just that I don’t think I’ve ever made anything look so easy. Never looked behind me and grinned or grimaced because nothing could stop me. I like the idea of it though, felt like a dream you could will into being: See a fence? Jump it.

leaves reattaching themselves to the tree like a strong spell for reversal. What else did I expect? What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

Gold ruins us. Men ruin us. That’s how the world was made, don’t you know?

Who would have told you life was a series of warnings, but also magic. Once, he was sent for a box of matches and he put that box of strike-anywheres in the pocket of his madras shirt and ran home, he ran so fast to be on time, to be good, and when he did so, the whole box ignited, so he was a boy running down the canyon road with what looked like a heart on fire. He’d laugh when he told you this, a heart on fire, he’d say, so you’d remember.

it didn’t make sense to trust a thing that could destroy you so quickly,

There is a truth in that smooth indifference, a clean honesty about our otherness that feels not like the moral but the story.

A friend writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely excited for the word lover to come back. Come back, lover, come back to the five-and-dime. I could squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover, what a word, what a world, this gray waiting.

and what I do not say is: I trust the world to come back. Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sunbeam, the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

What is lineage, if not a gold thread of pride and guilt? She did what? Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children, a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline? I told my friend D that, and she said, What if you want to kill your own bloodline, like it’s your job?

In order for someone to be “good” do they have to have seen the full-tilt world? Must they believe what we believe?

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

I could have started their story there, but it is endless and ongoing. All of this is a conjuring. I will not stop this reporting of attachments. There is evidence everywhere.

There’s a tree over his grave now, and soon her grave too though she is tough and says, If I ever die, which is marvelous and maybe why she’s still alive. I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves. Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?

But haven’t we learned by now that just because something is bound to break doesn’t mean we shouldn’t shiver when it breaks?

enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate, enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, I am asking you to touch me.