When we were alive and well in the long ago,
beautiful denizens of the deep, dark night,
love was in charge. Love ran the power stations,
dealt the drugs, bought the incense from Delhi,
which it paid for in turquoise coins
It ate chocolate at midnight
Its footprints started fires
And love named comets in the morning,
sailed down the River of Paradise
in the afternoon. Love promoted a belief
in fortune tellers and ballerinas
It lived on waterlily soup and white lies
Which is how girls meet, twirling in the street
with blazing haircuts. With jobs to go to
and insurance to sell. Dressed in iron skirts
and disguised in kitten heels, we typed the
capitalist manifestos while the clerks
were crying in the closet. We couldn’t
cry yet. We were still too young
But worry crept in. Would the imposters
be driven from the recital halls so we
could learn to play guitars? Would the
war end, would peace begin, would
justice ever be served? That’s how we
occupied the long middle years, with love
still claiming to be the cause and effect
But even when it paid the rent
I grew suspicious. It wouldn’t drink
coffee with us anymore and always
pretended to have forgotten
to buy cigarettes
But what I learned in secretary school
is that everyone gets tired
Everything slows down
Women take old poets in their arms
and try to pirouette, while in the
busy city of our dreams
women foretell love’s resurrection
They turn on the lights and wait
So last night,
when I woke up in your arms and said
Call me Elishka, you thought that I was someone else
But you and I have married in every impossible decade
that howled outside our door. Love comes and goes
like a ballerina, that’s what I say
Kiss me again and I’ll show you how
Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories and novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her novel, Radiomen (The Permanent Press), was awarded the 2016 John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her most recent novel, Satellite Street (The Permanent Press, 2019) was a finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Eric Hoffer Award. Her next novel, Watkins Glen, will be published by Mayapple Press in the spring of 2021. www.eleanorlerman.com
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