2009 Samples

Contest Winner

Samples

One Hundred Love Poems

Elizabeth Langemak

for Matilde Urrutia

Because he knew marriage was not just
a virtue but sometimes its lover,

he braced your name better

and hoped that it stuck: tree of rain,
flesh apple, dreamer who dreamed

the night-hole he slipped through

unnoticed as his wife slept. Entitled to none,
in those years you shared without thanks,

taker and giver in ownerless beds,

meetings in countries as foreign as first touch,
each hub of his body a chapter turned through

the fingers of two before you. How

like a book, after all, was his love: well-worn
and folded, spine cracked and bent,

marked up and noted by who-knows

how many. It was you who saw through
the author’s intention. Wooden was his word

for your blessing, finally a walk

against familiar seas without looking
at waves or sifting through sands, just

a handful of shells, stones and drift:

not what was left over, but what had been
come to. Tougher for trial. No, that was never

the question. But this was: reading

those hundred as he poured café, sugared
aguacate, did you want them bound

to the world as you were to him,

or could you spare us your prize?
Did you sense in those historied chairs

of your inherited kitchen that even

a love poem is also its opposite: half its heart
thumping in darkness, sleeping cold-quilted,

knowing its great part unwritten,

unpublished, itself for what it is: not alone
this time, not the one before nor after.