Not enough now to take off
the coat, the gloves.
Let me take off my skin,
my words, my thoughts
so that you can see
the sky here—so that
I might be as transparent
as air and you will find nothing
here but love. There, I said it,
love. Not the images of love,
not two birds or two rivers
or one bread or one blood,
not anything I could ever say
but love itself, infinite, a blue dome
expanding at the same rate
as the universe, on and on,
past the stars, there goes the Scales,
the Bull, the Scorpion, the Ram,
beyond whatever we could name,
it grows on and on and on and on and on
I like how you start describing the expansion of the universe and, of course, tie that in with love. And the simple way things start in this poem, with such a natural gesture as the taking off of a coat. Got me thinking about that Billy Collins poem, Purity. And I dug that out and read it again too:>)
Happy MD.
From Billy Collins’, “Purity”: Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
The poem tells of Collins taking off his clothing, then his skin, and finally removing his organs, arranging them neatly, before transmitting poetry across the opened pages.
I like (love[!]) your poem’s implication that at our essential core, we are both love, and the expansive and infinite universe. Y’know—the stuff of stars.