For married friends

I bumped into an old e-mail sig, one I had lifted from Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics. This is the third stanza of a poem entitled Their attitudes differ:

You held out your hand
I took your fingerprints

You asked for love
I gave you only descriptions

Please die I said
so I can write about it

But the better poem from that collection has no title but its first three words, “We are hard.” I’m quoting all four stanzas here. When everyone else was raving about Mary Oliver, this is what grabbed me. Especially the third stanza.

i

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.


ii

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them


iii

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?


iv

Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.

Pax omnibus.