Posts tagged Love

Poem: Security Systems

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November 25, 2012 * Dominique Larntz

 

We could build a wall, you and I,
and see it fall back into the particles
and pieces that all physical things turn into,
like Legos in earth’s generous toy chest.

You could write a cypher and make it cyber,
wed a hacker and the two of you could spend
your life staring at screens as your bellies quicken to text
and procedures instead of the bend of a baby’s elbow.

I could serve the neighborhood watch each night, my flashlight
joining the neighbor’s flashlight, repeating until the night yields
and the watch has to watch itself, being over-crowded
with people who need to turn the light on themselves.

You and I could amass a pile of nuts like a squirrel
or a pile of anything else that seems valuable now—funny
money that keeps changing forms—when I was young it was
cash and now it is a credit score or an abstract number on a card.

But we know, you and I, that nothing secures us to life,
not even our bodies, because we give them back too,
when destiny points directly to us and tells us it’s time
for the most courageous of human moments.

The only system that works for the human spirit is love,
life’s animating storyteller whose songs keep us fed, who meets
us at every grief and joy equally not as a fragile parent
but as an entire ocean for us to dissolve into as ice.

Poem: Be Quiet

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November 8, 2012 * Dominique Larntz

 

Be Quiet

Be with me without thinking
through what I should do.

Be quiet about your
superior view.

From your judgments,
icy stalactites and stalagmites arise
where moments ago
breath and water flowed.

I am surrounded by a society of judges
that turn conversations into caves
instead of skies.

People judge because they are
only one step removed
from the subject of their sentences.

Would it be too close
to say you are afraid to look
as vulnerable as I appear?

Be still, create space—

for as ugly as you think I am,
you with your unkind eyebrows
and the knots in your fists,
my heart is filled with love for you

as weak as you perceive that to be
it connects with you like nature
eventually overturns destruction
when you judge her irrelevant.

Poem: A New Habit

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Dominique Larntz * September 2, 2012

 

A New Habit

I think I did it first:
he asked me if I liked the shelf he finished

And in my mind I said,
are you kidding, it’s fantastic!

In my heart, I sang of the way a shelf
we carve into our lives to set a book upon
was made from a tree that reached as deeply into the dirt
as its branches stretched toward the sun.

He asked me again, a little perturbed this time.

“Do you like the new shelf?”

I shook myself and said aloud, “Yes, yes. I love it.”

I noticed this new habit we have—
assuming we have heard the other respond.

When we were younger and first in love,
we spoke together fast and secretly—so fast
that we would finish the others’ sentence
before listening and laughing in the joy of it.

Now our love life is ecstatic with age
and I can report back in time
that there is nothing more beautiful
than love well lived.

The love well lived requires both sides
to mature, both sides sometimes to be wrong,
a song of sacrifice lived behind the curtain
of deep desires to do something different than
is being done—requires abandoning the place of want
and its unending possibilities—those are ceded
with wonder and awe for the roots and depth
where we have best blossomed instead,
like two bookends slid securely into place
holding up stories on a shelf that will last for a while.

For twenty years, we have said and not said
so many wonderful things to each other; it seems
like sunshine to be around him.

Our relationship sustains this living landscape
and our daily lives are finally slow enough to feel it.

The other day, I asked him a question—
I can’t even remember what it was—
and he didn’t answer,
so I answered yes for him.

When you ask your next question,
only to wait and wait for its answer,
perhaps your spouse or child
or aging parent or God
is so ecstatic with you
they have this sense
you have already heard.

Poem: Birth Mother

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Dominique Larntz * July 8, 2012

 

Every child walks a mile as my child
and they make a trail of sacred steps
back to you, beautiful son.

I see to the needs of those around me
as if the mended ghosts of their wounds
will sing in the electricity around you.

I bathe the concave wombs I can save,
fill them with loving soup and soil,
set them out in the sunlight, let them go.

Poem: Dharma Antidote

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Dominique Larntz * July 2, 2012

 

Her body cradles the sorrow
in a canyon so deep
you can’t hear a quarter drop
when you let it go over the edge.

She’s been saying it’s fine
for you spin words of delusion
that swaddle her up to her throat
like a spider’s web.

Her body can’t heal any more
unless she follows the path
of rest and peace and joy,
taking every nap she desires.

Her nerves need a bath of love
and the culture is a river polluted
by overstimulation, by addicts
rushing to destruction.

Her cells weep in blood, the only
language they have, calling for life
to be lived, enjoyed, cherished,
preserved, flowed, balanced, loved.

Poem: Mixed Blessings

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Dominique Larntz * May 11, 2012

Mixed Blessings

Is our chemistry
such that
if I love you
like cake batter
at three hundred
and fifty degrees
for an hour
you will rise
to meet me
so that a tooth pick
inserted into the core
of our union
will come out clean?

Poem: Stent

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Dominique Larntz * May 10, 2012

Stent

They propped up his vein
and I keep wondering how that would be–
to have the most tender pathways
inside me opened up by doctors and devices.
I trace a line along my sternum with my finger
when he is not here and when he is beside me,
run my fingers along his chest, trying to feel it.

I place my right ear against his heart,
feeling the gallop of it inside him,
grateful for his life, grateful for mine,
feeling him as intimately
as I feel the inside of my eyelids.

He is the resolution of my life’s projections
and almost losing him to a heart attack
helps me know love the way you see space
only by the things that fill that space.

Poem: True Love

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Dominique Larntz * January 22, 2012 * “Love Songs To My Body”

True Love

There is a line in True Love
that goes:

You have the freedom
to choose me or not choose me
and when you say no to me
that is my opportunity
to sit as still as a gaze,
with all the urgings and functions
of my love for you kept in
the form of single drops
even though I know
altogether they make up
an ocean.

Poem: Breadmaker

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Dominique Larntz * January 15, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”

Breadmaker

I don’t know the reason
but there were many youthful years
when I could not be consoled,
and now all I need
in order to feel peaceful
is the hint that yeast exists
for the bread of joy to rise
from the core of my heels
to the crust of my hair.

The only gluten I can find
is your daily offering of love
that I have been
so lucky to discover,
kneaded faithfully
throughout the later decades
of this life that would be
unwise, bereft, and unbaked
but for the skillful addition of you.

Poem: Neighborhood

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Dominique Larntz * January 9 * “Love Letters To My Body”

Neighborhood

There is so much I can’t do today
that I am reminded
to think small
and then to think even
smaller.
I remember being eight years old
in elementary school.
The teacher polled us
on what we wanted to be
when we grew up.
I said I wanted to be president.
That stands as one of my brightest
negative moments
in socialization
as a child.
While I would have
voted for me,
it was obvious
even the teacher
was shocked
at such a desire
and would not
have cast a ballot
my way.
While my campaign
ended there,
I still find myself
returning to
the intersection
of the avenue-of-where-I-think-I-should-go
and the boulevard-of-the-way-I-was-made
thinking I can re-route the-avenue-
of-where-I-think-I-should-go
to be anything other than
a traffic circle
bringing me again
to the same,
gentle, right turn.
An exuberant day
can make any future appear possible
and it’s easy to forget that to manifest
a career takes twenty-to-forty years.
Life also brings days like today–you
can call it depression, low energy, tired.
And I wonder how I can be
of service in my life
and in the world on such a day,
when I feel I am no good
for doing anything.
And it takes me a long time–until 3 PM–to
even be able to formulate that question.
Almost before the question is finished,
life has offered three lousy drivers
in oversized vehicles.
Each encounter necessitated
that I slow down
in order to avoid collisions.
I cry a little because I realize those drivers
will never see that I saved their lives.
They will probably never know
the mistakes they made.
I am humbled by my small destiny
on my neighborhood roads today,
and the invisibility of it.
I look into the heart of my eyes
and I wonder how many times
in the future I will be able to see
the same humble moments in others.
I wonder how many times
I will be able to see the deftness
and joy that others have felt
as they have traversed this planet,
making the world a better place
in a thousand quiet, transparent acts.
I may be slow to see
and to appreciate
how much
the small
and the smaller still
delights the pathways
of our lives,
but my eyes are
in the neighborhood.

Poem: Bearing Witness

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Dominique Larntz * January 5 * “Love Letters To My Body”

Bearing Witness

Does my body bear fruit
like citrus, with some
squeezable, zestable,
usable outer peel
protecting an inside
so irrevocably liquid
that all you have to do is
twist your hand a bit
to release its juice
along with its
dozens of seeds
and possibly so sour
or so sweet
that it transforms the taste of what it is mixed with
and it cleanses what it rubs against
and it stings wounds it drops into,
and are there many chances–
from all those citrus seeds–
for propagation?

Or does my body bear fruit
like a peach or a plum
with a soft outer skin
that reveals strength
and density
and sweetness
all the way to
a central core seed,
one purpose from which
this type of fruit
propagates?

Or does my body bear fruit
like a coconut,
growing a series of shells
around sweet water
high up in a palm tree
until the day it is ready
to trust that falling
is part if its nature
and it joyfully releases its hold
from the branch
where it has suckled,
and it turns
to embrace the ground
as it stops resisting gravity
and holding onto the trunk–
with its singular seed,
complex and protected
inside many layers,
knowing others
of its kind have been
picked up by waves
and traveled ten thousand
ocean miles to germinate
on a beach
far from
where it started?

 

Poem: This is Where I Live

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Dominique Larntz * January 1, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”

This is Where I Live

I love my rich body,
and its pleasure
in pouring
into the world
like water.

I can sense a way
to hold myself
as I have spiraled
about you
and as I have been
the sweetest love letter
enveloped within
your arms.

There is no gratitude
physical enough
or loud enough
to express
the truth

that we ache
and arch
and reach
into mature creatures
as we see the seeds
of our identity
in the eyes
of our lovers.

 

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