They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century

They were not kidding
when they said they were blinded
by a vision of love.

It was not just a manner
of speaking or feeling
though it’s hard to say

how the dead
really felt harder
even than knowing the living.

You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency

seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires.

The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding.

Copyright © 2013 by Maureen McLane. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on July 1, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.