The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

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

our minds were pulled taut like a high black wire latched to a utility pole.

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.

SANCTUARY Suppose it’s easy to slip into another’s green skin, bury yourself in leaves and wait for a breaking, a breaking open, a breaking out. I have, before, been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world. 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.

Bury the broken thinking in the backyard with the herbs.

Some days—dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table— are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches, dizziness, and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes, between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left. Outside, all those redbuds are just getting good. I tell a friend, The body is so body.

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.

It’s cold today so the sun’s a lie. It’s all a lie, my closest confidant replies.

Sure, sure, it’s so obvious, that’s who to root for, the thing almost dead that is, in fact, not dead at all.

But also I could say that it came to me as the swallows circled us over and over, something about that myth of their tail, how generosity is punished by the gods.

Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?

Dearest purple spiderwort in the ditch’s mud, how did you do it? Such bravery, such softness, even with all that name-calling and rage. No one wants to be a pretty thing all the time. But no one wants to be the weed.

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.

Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. 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.

There is a knocking in the blood that is used to absence but hates this part the most. The sudden buried hope of illusion.

I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. 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.

life was a series of warnings, but also magic.

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

My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers.

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 miss who we all were, before we were this: half-alive to the brightening sky, half-dead already.

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?