This Is the Love
- This Is the Love
This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.This is my lover. But when I seize love, certain trees sing off-key.This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning.
This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, that is despotism.This is my law: it is ruddy-leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I may have it.These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought.
This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into free fall.This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree.
This is the love: limbs that slap through the lungs to sycamore out.This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life. [End Page 95]
diane raptosh's poetry collection American Amnesiac, from Etruscan Press, was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. The recipient of three literature fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the 2013 Boise Poet Laureate, as well as Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 2013 to 2016. In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor's Arts Award in Excellence. Her collection Dear Z was recently published by Etruscan Press. *
