Loving After Loss by Cass Donish

Loving After Loss

 

for RP

 

when two people kissing             

reinitiate each other’s foundation

—Malva Flores (trans. Jen Hofer)

 

 

 

all night long, the curtain was pulled back

and dawn drew me toward it, through the dark hours

in which, missing you, and feeling the strangeness

of missing you along with her, I swarmed above the pages

of a book searching for a lost syntax that could lead me

to this new form of desire, desire after obliteration,

I shouldn’t overstate this, the death of myself

when she died, I shouldn’t overstate it:

obliteration

 

                              the first time I saw you

I was already held in your arms,

we held each other standing in the grass in a storm,

it was the night my basement flooded and my house

vanished do you remember how the first time

we met we were already making love

in the rain we were already walking between

two houses at dawn we were already right here

in the early summer storm and then

you were in another city and I was already

missing you the day we met and realizing

I was in love with you the day we met you were

out of town and I met you in the dream I had

of walking by your house and looking up

just as you were opening the window

 

                      [when a lover’s mouth

                      reinvents a lost equation]

 

the first time I saw you, you were standing in the street

in front of my house and you waved hello

and said something from under your mask

the pandemic was ending soon on our block

we only had to be careful for a few more years

we didn’t touch for several more years

talking all night on the porch as we grew older

looking at our watches, turning pages on calendars

the first time I saw you, you were seconds

from being inside me for the first time

the first time I saw you I was pulling you

toward me, one foot on the earth,

one in the water, one star above us the first time

I saw you I was in a field without you

with the smell of thyme, animals wading in the river,

the heat of dusk on my skin, the air soaked with dusk-light

layered with dawn-light where we met for the first time

laughing nervously because we hadn’t slept

and we heard the birds beginning to fill with sound

 

           [how a lover’s voice

           reignites a new sensation]

 

                                             you were remarkable

                                            we were going to make love

for the first time and we knew it, I kept seeing

you at each moment for the first time and never

wanted this to end, resisted the urge

to know the end, I want to learn a different way to

            love I always want you         I always want to

see you for the first time and meet you

for the first time every time I wake up beside you

each morning resisting an anxiety I carry

under the surface of my skin because I am falling

in love for the first time and seeing you for the first

time each time I see you and I know the cost of love

            and yet poured forth this wish and yet couldn’t

have imagined you which is why I float in the half-night

sleepwalking with my eyes open

a sight that frightens even the animals

wading in the river and the butterflies

landing on my face who try to close my eyes for me

I tell them I’m on fire, that I carry love now

under my skin, that the love in me obliterated

me when she died and now it’s rebirthing

me into myself, this my own return

to my own transmuted bedrock the way

the way we touch becomes its own occasion