QUESTIONS OF THE HEART
Love slips away
like starshine, like the sea,
like summer. It’s here,
it’s gone,
you didn’t see
it go. Somehow,
though, love turned
to expectation, to demand,
to negotiation, to eyes
turned aside
from questions of the heart.
I equated love
with fate, believed
a specific someone waited
out there
for each of us,
the task was to stay loose,
stay alert, grab love’s main chance
when it came. Now I realize
people connect
for a million wrong reasons,
collide and entwine
and slide away and sometimes
split but often stay
together yet apart, year
after year, and then one day
a man is fifty years old
and wishing
someone loved him.
—from Rattle #17, Summer 2002
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David Jordan: “I write poetry to explain life to myself. If I continue to write, perhaps someday I will understand. That will be nice.”
