Evaluation

'How many carats should I weigh this love?'

This love

can’t walk on water

won’t fit your finger

doesn’t melt pain

 

promises nothing

rescues no-one.

 

This love

sees with the heart

walks through walls

gives the invisible

 

a dream that grows

real roses.

From my recent chapbook, Letters to a Dead Man,* released 

2023. (This piece first written 1982.)  

For Friday Writings #130 at Poets and Storytellers United, 

Magaly invites us to be inspired by a quotation from a book 

we've just read. I just read the delightful The Lost Bookshop 

by EvieWoods, in which one character tells another that a 

certain inscription in French 'means that one sees clearly only 

with the heart.' He then notes that it is a quotation from 

Antoine de Saint-Exupery – which is where I first came across 

it, in the book The Little Prince, translated as: 'It is only with 

the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible 

to the eye' (the original source of my allusion in this poem – 

which, obviously, was not written for the present prompt, but 

fits it serendipitously). 

*Letters to a Dead Man is obtainable via my website 

www.nissen-wade.com

Footsteps

I walk in the footsteps of an old self – mine – retracing that strange and painful journey. I pause at certain places … linger … look long. I don’t plan to make this journey again. 

It’s a pilgrimage. 

If, when I began, I thought it merely a revisiting, a ‘trip down memory lane’ (how blithe that sounds!) – by now I intend completion. 

I have been reluctant to let you go. I wanted to tell our story. The saddest story, yes, but also beautiful. I can’t. It sounds just like hundreds of others, when told. I perceive it’s not meant to be revealed – not in its every detail. It was ours alone to live, to know. That was enough reason for it to be! I only want to tell it now to preserve it, but that’s a false and foolish goal. 

We lived, we met, we loved, you died. I walk again, deliberately, in the footsteps of my journey with you, where our paths intersected, entangled…. 

I reach

that final crossroad 

holding

one last gaze –

your blue eyes

Tanka for a dead man

I can’t draw, but

I let my pen wander 

across the page

while I think of you, and

the lines flow gracefully

*********

poems

reminiscences

dreams –

I watch myself writing

letters to a dead man

*********

your notebooks –

old lines that linger 

to show me

you not only loved me

you listened and heard

*********

we quoted

from certain poems 

certain lines –

in ways that made them

secret messages

The Love of My Life

The few to whom I tell our story think you must have been the love of my life. I don’t like to think in those terms. I have also loved others well. How could I put you above my dear Andrew, my third and last husband, my happiest marriage? He was such a dear, we were so close, best friends as well as lovers.

But then, I could not say I loved him more than you – even though no loves could have been more different.

You are certainly one of the loves of my life! Though I won’t say I loved you the most, neither could I truthfully say that I ever loved anyone more.

May you rest in peace! (May all my dear, dead loves rest in peace.)

an old lady

many years later

I think of you

whenever love is mentioned –

always that leap of my heart 

The title was a prompt at the Tanka Poets On Site group on facebook.

Remembrances

The light in your greeny-blue eyes, reminder of a summer ocean.

The way one lock of your hair always used to stick up, rebellious.

Your freckles, your flushed cheeks, your whole face lighting up with sudden laughter.

How fervently you would debate a point to understand it better.

Your hands moving swiftly through books and papers, or stilled and warm in mine.

The time I leaned back against your chest, your cradling arms around my waist.

All the lines that you wrote me: letters, poems, and that book inscription.

The path we walked our last day together, sunlight warm on our faces.

Written in response to Magaly's request for a list poem, in Friday Writings #40 at Poets and Storytellers United. Each item in my list is an American Sentence, the form created by Allen Ginsberg.