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Among my friends love is a great sorrow.
It has become a daily burden, a feast,
a gluttony for fools, a heart’s famine.
We visit one another asking, telling one another.
We do not burn hotly, we question the fire.
We do not fall forward with our alive
eager faces looking through into the fire.
We stare back into our own faces.
We have become our own realities.
We seek to exhaust our lovelessness.
Among my friends love is a painful question.
We seek out among the passing faces
a sphinx-face who will ask its riddle.
Among my friends love is an answer to a question
that has not been asked.
Then ask it.
Among my friends love is a payment.
It is an old debt for a borrowing foolishly spent.
And we go on, borrowing and borrowing from each other.
Among my friends love is a wage
that one might have for an honest living.
-- Robert Duncan
“In Praise of Imperfect Love”
Courtesans of tenth century Japan knew
the keening of the caged copper pheasant,
solo double-note aria for a missing mate,
could be silenced with a mirror
The ideal of a love that completes
masks a yearning for homeostasis,
a second umbilical, island fever,
harmony tighter than unison —
dull as a solved equation;
like the ex-lover who said,
"Being with you is like being alone."
He meant it as a compliment.
-- Jessica Goodfellow
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