For Now, Loss

Painting by Paul Gauguin


For Now, Loss

Looking back, I see stopped
obeying your heart. Perhaps,
I wanted to quit the deception.
That leaving everyday,
to go from our life to my own.
Transporting the lies
and the make-believe, all along
the beach and the world, too.
How everything had to be dealt with
in dual form. The freedom I sought
becoming the emptiness
which drained us. I see now
that my mind and language gave
rise to an unknown syntax,
as those hours away and the dreaming
slowly altered my heart.
Was it the adventure I needed,
the wildness I thought
I was built on. It seems
I feared your vision of me,
something more than I was,
a thing I had to build up into
but could not; couldn't be loyal,
couldn't be honest,
couldn't stay home.

Often when I was in some foreign place,
here or there
along the edge of the planet, living
out those creative days you gave me.
I used to ask myself
what I was doing there.
Living in a hut without you
trying to write about love,
and using my body and heart
as the national anthem
of my regret. Sometimes
I like to blame my imagination,
or pass the crimes onto
my all-sexual spine. But the villain
may instead be a thing
of beauty and power that jumps out
and catches the day.

Tell me I am fractured now
by my excursions, finished
and disconnected, a piece of wood
that death flows into. So
I have not built up a sexual fence
between myself and everthing sacred.
That kind that never ends,
when once it gets a hold of you.
Reassure me that if I lose
everything, all of it;
the white walls in the night,
the moonlight on the stone,
it will not stop the truth,
that you were the miracle, the woman
who worked at my slowness,
suffered the troubled development,
and poured beauty into
the whole lonely assembly.

Barry Tagrin

from "Collage of the Soul"