If You Must Hide Yourself From Love
It is important to face the rear of the train as it leaves the republic. Not that all departing is yearning. First love is a factory. We sleep in a bed that had once been a tree. Nothing is forgot. Yet facts, over time, lose their charm, warned a dying Plato. You have to isolate the lies you love. Are we any less photorealistic? I spot in someone's Face- book sonogram a tiny dictum full of syllogisms. One says: all kisses come down to a hole in the skull, toothpaste and gin; therefore your eyes are bull, your mouth is a goal.
Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Salerno. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on March 24, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"Love hurts, warned The Everly Brothers. Especially when we let passion trump reason. After all, as Plato suggests, there are any number of available 'beds in nature' to make one's lovelife more complicated. As humans we struggle with the difference between physical, emotional, and intellectual love. Sometimes we simply need to bail out of the whole enterprise, and sometimes, after a great pain, we may need to censor it from our lives. To see sentimentality for what it is. Only then do we come back (to love) even stronger."
—Christopher Salerno
Christopher Salerno
Christopher Salerno is the author of Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey.