Lines on Love’s (Loss*)
what we do not dream we cannot manufacture
Art follows ear and echo
covers/chooses
selective
eyesight searches the dust
and is surprised by love’s
apophatic blinking
what love sees in daily light
holds open color—ink, roar, melody and quiet
is its own steady gaze
to better endure bumps
“always more song to be sung” between the words
jars memory and its subatomic
moving at the speed of thought
in random thirsts rise
name the sensations,
to fish for breath,
combing through hair as tangled as nets, as
thick as the beat of blossoms’
a fine line between mind and senses spinning
in which her/my/their body becomes expert
without waiting for unified theory,
loving the body of one’s choice and
to live so surrounded
with fewer asterisks and
more verbs and
fewer security alerts
there eloquence before
and above
the grave.
*For Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor
Copyright © 2020 by Erica Hunt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 1, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Lines on Love's (Loss*)’ assembles many aphoristic phrases and fragments gathered over the years into one poem. The poem reads love of many varieties—agape, romantic, communal, and spiritual—as difficult and transformative. The poem was a poem before the blanks were added, but the blanks are important to the sense I wanted to convey that art, like love, stimulates our imaginations through open forms. I use the word ‘apophatic’ to signal how poetic art marks deep ‘truths’ as powerfully as direct citation through sound (music) and form.”
—Erica Hunt