For Love by Robert Creeley

For Love

    

    for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to 

speak of it, that sense above   

the others to me 

important because all 

that I know derives 

from what it teaches me.   

Today, what is it that   

is finally so helpless, 

different, despairs of its own   

statement, wants to 

turn away, endlessly 

to turn away. 

If the moon did not ... 

no, if you did not 

I wouldn’t either, but   

what would I not 

do, what prevention, what   

thing so quickly stopped.   

That is love yesterday   

or tomorrow, not 

now. Can I eat 

what you give me. I 

have not earned it. Must   

I think of everything 

as earned. Now love also   

becomes a reward so 

remote from me I have 

only made it with my mind. 

Here is tedium, 

despair, a painful 

sense of isolation and   

whimsical if pompous 

self-regard. But that image   

is only of the mind’s 

vague structure, vague to me   

because it is my own. 

Love, what do I think 

to say. I cannot say it. 

What have you become to ask,   

what have I made you into, 

companion, good company,   

crossed legs with skirt, or   

soft body under 

the bones of the bed. 

Nothing says anything   

but that which it wishes   

would come true, fears   

what else might happen in 

some other place, some   

other time not this one.   

A voice in my place, an   

echo of that only in yours. 

Let me stumble into 

not the confession but   

the obsession I begin with   

now. For you 

also (also) 

some time beyond place, or   

place beyond time, no   

mind left to 

say anything at all, 

that face gone, now. 

Into the company of love   

it all returns.