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by Rachel Hadas
I didn’t just dream you into being.
I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
in the river of not having you, we lived
together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
and we were parted for a thousand years.
I will need to be young until I’m old.
I have resolved to keep from looking back
to that ignorant age when the want
was unknown, when I could live without you.
Necessities I never knew I knew
until meeting you a few days
or many lifetimes ago—
but who am I to find a solution?
It’s an impossibility to map the mind.
You can’t remember
where it is you’re supposed to be
or if there is even anywhere
other than here.
I need water and food and air
and someone who loves me never to leave.
We were running round and round the garden.
High walls: could joy escape?
A thick tree root bursting through a concrete square.
Could we get out? Did we want to?
We wanted to taste each other.
Mouths open each other up in their collision.
We recognized a flavor
that in those thousand years apart
we hadn’t quite forgotten.
You change and change
and keep on changing
and none of it matters.
No time to be everything to each other,
no time to be less than everything.
Oh absent and oh present,
necessities I never knew I knew.
I have resolved to keep from looking back.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart,
as a seal upon thine arm,
for love is as strong as death.
Two winds are blowing.
The death wind may be easier;
the gusts of love force people to make choices.
Here we stand at the crossroads.
Garden, red and green and rich brown earth
from which what tree will grow?
I woke two months ago
to newly fallen snow.
It seemed we were about to cross a threshold.
I am not whole without you. See this crack?
How did I break it? Going through the gate.