The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

Why am I not allowed delight?

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.

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.

I just came to this life again, alive in my silent way.

Last night I dreamt I could only save one person by saying their name and the exact time and date. I choose you.

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.

He takes only what he needs and lives a life that some might call small,

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

I will never be a mother. That’s all. That’s the whole thought.

Every now and then, his teeth come at me once again; he wants to teach me something, to get me where it hurts.

Between the ground and the feast is where I live now.

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

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.

What is it to be seen in the right way? As who you are? A flash of color, a blur in the crowd, something spectacular but untouchable.

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.

We think time is always time. And place is always place.

Is it okay to begin with the obvious?

What a pleasure to say, I am Magnificent.

It makes me want to give all my loves the adjectives they deserve: You are Resplendent. You are Radiant. You are Sublime.

The three of us, always piling into the back of some cab and deciding what was next, which was never bed because there was still so much to figure out.

and this is my secret work, to be worthy of you both and this infinite discourse where everything is interesting

We did what children do with tiny and terrible things, we trapped them so we could see more closely, intimately, investigate their particular evildoing,

Is this where I am supposed to apologize?

I wanted to catch something; it wanted to live.

the year I killed a thing because I was told to, the year I met my twin and buried him without weeping so I could be called brave.

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.

But I knew, I knew that he’d cry if he was alone, if he wasn’t a boy in the summer heat being a boy in the summer heat.

I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing, only for a second, long enough to admire it fully, and then wants to watch it safely return to its life, bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.

I walked until I was softer, until clouds, until I could tame my colors

Maybe this is suffering? I thought. Am I suffering now? Or now?

I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.

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.

I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.

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.

They say, Stop, and still I want to make them into something they are not.

The crows seem enormous but only because I am watching them too closely. They do not care to be seen as symbols.

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

I am upset by this, but it is life, so I make dinner and listen to a terrible audiobook on Latin American literature that’s so dull it’s Dove soap.

Not the form but the marrow of form.

Is it time that moves in me now? A sense of ache and unraveling,

As a child I once cried when he shaved it. Even then, I was too attached to this life.

Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits about frantically, unsure where to land.

To me, it didn’t make sense to trust a thing that could destroy you so quickly, to reach out your hand and stroke the deep separateness of a beast,

friend writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely excited for the word lover to come back.

What is lineage, if not a gold thread of pride and guilt?

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?

After her husband of seventy-six years has died, my grandmother (yes, I said it, grandmother, grandmother) leans to me and says, Now teach me poetry.

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