He seems to me equal to gods that man in my eyes, he seems like god’s co-equal. He’ll hie me, par is he? The god divide me, he seems able to dizzy me, to make my stomach empty.
If any museum had a postcard of Adonis, in his absence, I went and collected it. But even these could not rival the beauty that sunders unhappy me from all my senses.
I mean to be always in his presence. Him, who my limbs give into, whose limbs give into me. We didst have chapped lips from kissing, We didst miss classes because we fucked. Both my eyes, like nights at noon, dark to all but him.
We didst marry. Leisure is dangerous to me and it ruined fine cities but leisure also in his eyes made orbs, made galaxies and if I never let go his body grips me all (greener than grass I am dead—or almost, I seem to me).
This unabashed love poem begins with an adaptation of a line from Catullus (poem 51) who steals his line from Sappho (poem 31). The poem attempts to re-member what it was I initially felt in the presence of my now husband. It appears in a book that is obsessed with the number eleven, and as such it is an excessive rebellion, announcing itself as it does as an eighteen-line poem.
"The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22) by Marvin Thompson, a school teacher in Wales, was judged the best from more than 18,000 poems....'As with all my poems, it was written for my children, a gift to their future selves,” he said. “A poem to be read on nights when the weight of being a dual-heritage person in Britain feels too heavy to bear.'"
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"Here are two things I have a difficult time writing about: myself and the sacredness of a great poem. Maybe a great poem can give us shape when our own—that is, whatever holds us together—has slipped away."
