You See What We've Become

You See What We've Become

How fearful it is to go on
hunting the woman I love.
To be impossibly loving another woman.
To be a husband and a demon,
death and life,
hope and meanness,
To further invent the end of a
marriage that was so beautiful.
I look back on thirty years of
sexual worship, promiscuity,
and obsession; and am conscious
of the drain out of the bottom
of my world. The coming of the
last lonely fall.
Once again and finally,
in the living room, or den,
out in the yard in the twilight,
blood in the mouth, weeping
in the grass. Forgotten at the base
of the steps, a face on the stone
in the moonlight. Hardly one emotion
clean now of another, as my heart
shifts from lover to wife,
wife to lover, conflicting.
To live what can be lived.
To be away, beyond, where there is
a measure in me yet found.
The immense ramifications of desire.
The anti-harmony weeping.
The dirt alleyways
and the rising temperature.
We wish for the doors that open
and run inside, all to wake
there in the unknown beautiful.
I wonder will the man ever be
magic and grown? Will he rise
one today free of temptation?
Yes, this darker love beats
at me, making its distance
between us. Probably I won't
go back, at least
not in time.

Barry Tagrin

from "Collage of the Soul"