Margaret Menamin

Baptism

Midnight in the street
and the rain is my universe.

In these few blocks
between two drenched doors
I shed you.
You are in me no more,
no more.

You wash from my pores
into the gratings
like yesterday’s dust.

Your eyes are an old place
a life’s distance away.
I see you
through a warm running galaxy
that smells of drawn-out secrets.

At this hour
I need to call you,
speak of this baptism;
need to say
I am empty of you,
you are in me no more.

Baucis and Philemon

I believe I know how it will be
with you and me:
Coming silent one day through the wood
where last you stood,
I will stop, remembering, and see
a newsprung tree.

It will be as if it had been planned:
Where then you stand
I will stop, remembering, and see
a wild young tree
tall and straight among the others, and
put forth my hand.

As I touch your greenness, some strange thing
will leap and sing
within the hardening fibers of my hand.
So we will stand,
season on season, summer after spring,
remembering.

Galatea

It was the stone in me that struck your soul,
Pygmalion. The softness I became
could not ignite the chisel’s edge to flame
and light your godhead. With my breath I stole
your right to breathe. I damned you when I stepped
from that cold pedestal and cracked the air
that cupped its iron fingers on my hair.
Blood sings articulate in limbs that slept,
I carve sweet motion from my mobile thought.
I strive for constellations with my hand,
float in my paths. You cannot understand
this exquisite mortality, who sought
to animate a fierce and fixed desire.
Your hands grow cold before the moving fire.

Le Morte d’Amour

Love, we were foolish with our lofty talk
of Hero and Leander, Romeo
and his ill-fated Juliet! I know
I could not be persuaded soon to walk
into a raging river for your sake
or drink unquestioning some devil’s brew.
I am quite willing, dear, to live for you,
but life’s the strongest potion I can take.
 
How can it prove love true, whatever’s said,
to quench the fire that lights the midnight crying?
Hell take these deathless loves that end in dying!
When we lie lovers in our final bed,
what shall it profit us that love survive?
Let us be false, and fickle, and alive.

Separation

Nothing can bond so tightly to the skin
as separation. Patient and discreet
it keeps its distance rather than compete
with any blooded thing, then wedges in
without a warning. Skeletal and thin
I feel its moldy bones that rub and beat
against my own, the footsteps that repeat
its presence like the echo of a twin.

Unwelcome as some sullen squatter kin,
tenacious as the shadow at my feet,
your absence moves beside me on the street:
so does the dreary partnership begin.
So do I touch a ghost each time I place
my hand before me, looking for your face.