There Is Love

Afternoon sun, and suddenly the returning prisoner scratching at the old lover’s door,
the one he left behind in the half-shadow, half-light,
dragging his years of sin and memory up the veranda steps like a sack of bricks,
asking in a low voice—are the children sleeping, or still marching into the schoolyard dream?
The air thick with gossip already, the servants leaning in from the kitchen,
the neighbors crouched at their windows, the film-people with their cameras and hungry tongues—
scandal always splattered across page one, charity and blood hidden in the classifieds,
as though the truth itself were embarrassed to breathe.
This is the time for stories, not the tidy ones,
but the clumsy, the overheated, the interrupted,
the kind that break open when someone whispers come closer
and the characters refuse to speak unless you touch their skin.
What is love in middle age but money, property,
children’s faces flickering between appointments,
health insurance files stacked like gravestones,
or the sudden crash of a teacup, the daily quarrel rehearsed as ritual yoga,
the domestic body kept alive by conflict as much as affection—
yet still the hunger of mouths, oral, physical,
love in any shape stumbling back like a ghost of a dream,
and what does it matter?
The sun pressing down on the room until the walls sweat,
hair tangled, the holiday too sudden, the bird scream splitting the silence,
news of a neighbor’s death floating in through the half-open door,
and still the bottle uncorked, the old liquor breathing new perfume,
the taste of youth curdling with age until something unnamed is born again.
And here, in the delirium of the afternoon,
you look at your wife as if she were your lover,
and your hand remembers what your heart almost forgot—
though the dreams are gone,
there is love,
there is love,
there is love.