Poem for committed lovers

[Cabin]

I found this poem by Robert Hass that really encapsulates how real and how heartbreaking it is to find love outside one's marriage. His last line haunts me, as it may many of you...

 

Then Time

Robert Hass

 

 

 

In winter, in a small room, a man and a woman

Have been making love for hours. Exhausted,

Very busy wringing out each other's bodies,

They look at one another suddenly and laugh.

"What is this?" he says. "I can't get enough of you,"

She says, a woman who thinks of herself as not given

To cliché. She runs her fingers across his chest,

Tentative touches, as if she were testing her wonder.

He says, "Me too." And she, beginning to be herself

Again, "You mean you can't get enough of you either?"

"I mean," he takes her arms in his hands and shakes them,

"Where does this come from?" She cocks her head

And looks into his face. "Do you really want to know?"

"Yes," he says. "Self-hatred," she says. "Longing for God."

Kisses him again. "It's not what it is," a wry shrug,

"It's where it comes from." Kisses his bruised mouth

A second time, a third. Years later, in another city,

They're having dinner in a quiet restaurant near a park.

Fall. Earlier that day, hard rain: leaves, brass-colored

And smoky-crimson, flying everywhere. Twenty years older,

She is very beautiful. An astringent person. She'd become,

She said, an obsessive gardener, her daughters grown.

He's trying not to be overwhelmed by love or pity

Because he sees she has no hands. He thinks

She must have given them away. He imagines,

Very clearly, how she wakes some mornings,

(He has a vivid memory of her younger self, stirred

From sleep, flushed, just opening her eyes)

To momentary horror because she can't remember

What she did with them, why they were gone,

And then remembers, calms herself, so that the day

Takes on its customary sequence again.

She asks him if he thinks about her. "Occasionally,"

He says, smiling. "And you?" "Not much," she says,

"I think it's because we never existed inside time."

He studies her long fingers, a pianist's hands,

Or a gardener's, strong, much-used, as she fiddles

With her wineglass and he understands, vaguely,

That it must be his hands that are gone. Then

He's describing a meeting that he'd sat in all day,

Chaired by someone they'd felt, many years before,

Mutually superior to. "You know the expression

'A perfect fool,'" she'd said, and he has liked her tone

of voice so much. She begins a story of the company

In Maine she orders bulbs from, begun by a Polish refugee

Married to a French-Canadian separatist from Quebec.

It's a story with many surprising turns and a rare

Chocolate-black lily at the end. He's listening,

Studying her face, still turning over her remark.

He decides that she thinks more symbolically

Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,

For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.

She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,

Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure

In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.

It moves her - in the way that earnest limitation

Can be moving, and she is moved by her attraction to him.

Also by what he was to her. She sees her own avidity

To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate,

From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road

A startled deer running across an open field in the rain.

Wild thing. Here and gone. Death made it poignant, or,

If not death exactly, which she'd come to think of

As creatures seething in a compost heap, then time.