I Know I Have Loved Patricia
after O’Hara/Reeves/Vuong/Rader
There have been days I must have loved you, Patricia
and not in the way a mantis loves its mate
or in the way a copulating octopus may murder
her lover—her arms pulling tight in aggression,
blocking his gills from ocean’s oxygen
so deep below the surface scientists don’t know
when or how often.
Someday I’ll love you often, perhaps without condition
and say so, letting the words I love you
slide out in audible bursts, imperfect in meaning
but perfect in mouthfeel—words incapable
of love themselves,
inanimate and two-dimensional, only given life
in how they pass from throat to ear,
a type of protist, no mouth or muscles,
no stomach, no blood, no veins. Yet, we use a word to name and rename.
I had to change
yours to discover selflove.
When your daughter was young, she too craved
a name that meant something more than the one given—
one day it happened
and she became more—Clementine
with sunshine hair and limbs of leafy vine.
You never knew
you loved such words, words that became your children:
her lovely orange contrast against her older brother’s Sky.
You can’t compare your son to a cloudless summer day—warm yet
capable of anything in mere moments—the lightning
that has slashed in when least expected and nearly
shut his eyes for good.
When you were young
you loved the lightning—not its sudden shock
but the smell of thunder riding its heels
across the horizon, a reminder of the power
to both give life and take it
—and how you can only wait for it,
in the same way a poet collects words and forms phrases;
words that can both give love and take it.
Someday you will write a selfless poem,
if there is such a poem,
as if selflessness exists in any artform, but none of this
is what I mean to say. I mean to tell you this:
Certain he would be blessed with a firstborn son,
your father named you Jonathan
before you were born.
Your mother says your name
unveiled in a vision when you arrived a girl;
she says, highly born of gentle waters;
she says divinely inspired.
So I have no questions about the person you may have been,
the name re-given to your younger brother—or maybe there are questions
after all.
Remember, Patricia, when the OBGYN pressed the sonogram wand
into the balloon of your belly,
showed a formed face and declared with 90% certainty
your first child a girl. You, too, were surprised the day he arrived
born a son, whom you named
for the sky.
I know I have loved you in ways both selfish and selfless;
rarely do I regret those ways
and even if I do, I give you permission to be content
with whom you’ve become—
with my love or without it
—this brutish woman I love to know.
-orig. published in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics
