The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

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.

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 seemed a furtive magic— sun ricocheting off cresting waves near Stillwater Cove, the soft rock cliffs of sandstone and clay, the wind-tilted cypress trees leaning toward the blue Pacific—and it was only you who’d see them.

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

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.

At the top of the mountain is a murderous light, so strong it’s like staring into an original joy, foundational, that brief kinship of hold and hand, the space between teeth right before they break into an expansion, a heat.

We hurry. We hanker. We beg and beg. When should we mourn?

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,

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.

Am I stronger or weaker than when the year began, a lie that joins two selves like a hinge.

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 took no notes, though I’ve stared too long.

What is it to be wholly loved like this?