Never Lovers

“Leave me in an anguish of dark planets, / but do not show me your cool waist.” Lorca

I

Since you have never seen Granada’s blue-black night

Pierced by the morning sun’s orange-gold dissembling hues,

Nor watched white lily of pale skin leavened from dark

With rise and fall of sleep-soft breast and breath—you fail.

Nor do you know what it is to regard love’s face

Still as walls and fear its owner won’t awaken

When your hands at quake, in disbelief, must caress,

Against the mind’s will, to stop that anguished foresight

As eyes meet eyes, open to closed, watching for blinks

Until relief, in flood, comes touching face to face,

Rains of kisses spilled on lips tasting of sour night

Or dreaming’s journeys, rot, decay, the sweetest bile

Of intimate possession, ownership of more

Than only good taste—we have never been lovers.

II

Since we have never been lovers, and will not be,

I reclaim my many imagined dreams, shoot grey

Into their horrible structures of smoke. Decide

You cease to exist for me as more than time’s waste.

Sun-baked fruits, hot days after nights, regret split skins

As real lovers do: Always, you called to me. Yes.

But this cold bed has never welcomed your warming weight.

Real lovers make tenderness meals from others’ flesh.

Flash and burn, flash and burn, tease and deny. You win.

I no longer even recognize heat’s desire—

There is only the dead star of a gone moon here,

The melancholy gasp of a person who lives

In returns of the darkest nights—when the daylight

Seems to beg all people, Do not think of love! Wake.

III

In retrospect, we were not even that strange breed

Of humans who fuck without love, not animals

Pounding the flesh of another in the open.

Oh, more’s the pity. You refused me even that.

Yet the sweet weeping of guitar in the plaza,

This was your gift. The promise of infinity.

I would rather we’d spent one night, hurting ourselves,

Than this, this hell of memory, strumming, and never.

Leave me in the anguish of your false heart. I sigh

As the celestial nude sighs. Tomorrow will be

Rocks, place of slime, place of wires, place of amnesia.

I will take a man’s body and break it like bread

(Or the body of Christ) on my thighs, communion.

We were never lovers. I don’t know what we made.

Heather Fowler is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and novelist. Among other things, she is the author of the story collections Suspended Heart, People with Holes, This Time, While We're Awake, and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine. Visit her here: www.heatherfowler.com