AFTER READING OLD UNREQUITED LOVE POEMS - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

If I didn’t think it’d make me appear crazy still,

I’d apologize to you for having been so crazy then.

Reading the poems I had written about “us”

resurrected all that nervous heat, reminded me

of the insistent stutter of my longing,

how I could never just lay it out there for you.

The answer, clearly, would have been

no, thank you. But perhaps that tough line

would have been enough to salvage

all that was good and woolly about us:

your laugh, the golden ring I’d always

stretch a story for; the pair of mittens

we’d split in the cold so we’d each have

a hand to gesture with; how even now,

the paths we took are filled with starry wonder

and all that bright limitless air. I’m sorry

I could never see myself out

of the twitching fever of my heartache,

that I traded everything we had for

something that never ended up being.

But if I could take anything back, it wouldn’t be

the glittering hope I stuck in the amber of your eyes,

or the sweet eager of our conversations.

No, it would be that last stony path

to nothing, when we both gave up without

telling the other. How silence arrived

like a returned valentine on that morning

we finally taught our phones not to ring.

First Love - Wisława Szymborska (Translation By Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)

They say

the first love's most important.

That's very romantic,

but not my experience.

 

Something was and wasn't there between us,

something went on and went away.

 

My hands never tremble

when I stumble on silly keepsakes

and a sheaf of letters tied with string

— not even ribbon.

 

Our only meeting after years:

two chairs chatting

at a chilly table.

 

Other loves

still breathe deep inside me.

This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

 

Yet just exactly as it is,

it does what the others still can't manage:

unremembered,

not even seen in dreams,

it introduces me to death.

The Geranium - Theodore Roethke

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled,

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,

Or a wizened aster in late September,

I brought her back in again

For a new routine--

Vitamins, water, and whatever

Sustenance seemed sensible

At the time: she'd lived

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,

Her shriveled petals falling

On the faded carpet, the stale

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--

The dumb dames shrieking half the night

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,

Me breathing booze at her,

She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--

And that was scary--

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,

I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,

I was that lonely.