The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.

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

You can’t sum it up. A life.

No one said it was my job to remember.

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?

when I first thought love could be the thing to save me after all

If I had known it would be you, who even then I liked to look at, across a room, always listening rigorously, a self-questioning look, the way your mouth was always your mouth,

If I had known, the truth is, I would have kneeled and said, Sooner, come to me sooner.

Even my deep cleavage and the layer cake were trying too hard.

Still, we committed to the event of us and made a joke about not hurting each other again.

And aren’t we all alone in the end? You put your head for a moment against my chest.

Your body I thought belonged to me, until I learned about belonging, was sublime, looming over me like a gauntlet, and because you were a challenge, I rose from the cold to meet you.

One day, I will be stronger. I feel it coming.

I miss who I was. I miss who we all were, before we were this: half-alive to the brightening sky, half-dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry. I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

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 the longing and the ego and the obliteration of ego,

enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, I am asking you to touch me.