Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.

            She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.

            A small bird flew in circles where we stood;

            The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.

                                                —From Theodore Roethke’s “The Dream”



At the artists’ colony, my yogurt

bowl has green paint along its rim, remnant

of a painter, solo for weeks, perhaps

trying to capture this landscape, its apt

pond, sycamores.  When I last stayed, twenty

years ago, heat and spiders got to me.

But it was July, and I was homesick

for New York, my dumb expectations thick

for new love that would never be stable.

Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.
And now you, who I thought could be in it

for the long haul, for my moods and judgment

and disparate wants, calling to break up.

Today’s cool wind and the chattering scrub

jays remind me of a woman I knew

here: we’d sit talking, drinking, till the blue

sky darkened into stars.  A female friend

visited—I heard them laugh and fuck, wend.

Where is that lonely girl I was, careful?

She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.
I wanted her to think me audacious

too, that in me lay a wild, tremulous

desire that my thirty-two-year-old

self could actually face, could choose the bold.

Now that I have, your love threatens to leave,

as if I’ve lied still, or I wouldn’t grieve.

Some friends and loves are fleeting, October

thunderstorms in the desert: loud, over.

I promised to write, though I never would.

A small bird flew in circles where we stood;
and my “real life” beckoned.  A full moon in

Aries surfaced hidden fears last weekend,

that you would never be enough for me,

future trip to a dead end road.  Likely

chorus of things you’ve told yourself.  But you

and I have never perched on a lake’s blue

edge, or sat looking over green valleys,

or held each other through a storm’s fierce trees.

What if we took a walk and as we stood,

the deer came down, out of the dappled wood.