What I Know About Loving at 47

No pop song or novel or poem
or prose or lecture or prayer,
no advice ever given
has prepared you for falling
in love.

Nothing in the universe
entire has prepared you
for falling
out of love.

“Falling” is a wildly inadequate word
for how love colonizes your mind
and your body, floods your brain
with chemicals, presses your lungs
into service as bellows
for its own fires.

Biologically speaking, love may be
no different from a parasitic
wasp yet how I’ve begged
to be stung, shocked into
that mysterious moment
when every emotion is fed through
a meat grinder and comes out
as love sausage—
that moment, each time, when
the Big Bang echoes in our minds
disguised as an original idea.

Desire and lust may be the swing
on the front porch of love’s
country house, or the brambled path
to its outhouse, the only difference being
whether your ass is covered or bare
when you sit down to do
what needs to be done.

Having loved means being able to hurt
in ways you won’t want to survive
because surviving means you are done
with the loving.

The more vast your love the more you
will hurt your love the more you will
be unable to say you are sorry though
you are, you are—a three-sided vortex
that is the origin of the myth
of the Bermuda Triangle.

Never ever ever ever ever ever ever love
somebody more than you love
yourself. Good luck on that.

Do not let experience or knowledge
or lesbian feminist anti-colonialist
anti-parasite anti-sausage cynicism
stop the sway or get in the way of the need
for love’s gravitational tug.
Carry a tow chain in one hand, a tide chart
in the other, leave the life vest
on the shore, dive in. With practice
drowning gets easier, and I practice now
every day.