Adoration is Not Irrelevant

You, my adoration—no fooling—I've
called my auburn-haired beauty
in ignorance, in 70 year ignorance
because that's what people told me—
but you, woman of radiance, shouldn't
I study you more closely. Oh, my love!
Not auburn, then. Perhaps sorrel,
my sorrel-haired beauty, quiet, wild,
hidden in the oaks. Yes, like the 3-year
fallow deer in the far end of the pasture,
exactly. Name me the color, Persephone-
o'-th'-Oneidan-hills, for it is yours too,
tender goddess. Are you here? There? No,
she has vanished to Hades again, in-
constant girl. But my darling is here.
Let it be sorrel, sweetheart, a soothing
yet somewhat exotic color, rare in the
world. I hold you, your breast, your
belly, like new flesh for my own body,
and bury my face in your hair, here
in our mid-autumn kitchen with the
woodstove warming us—well, I am too old,
and you are my young love, you really
are my adoration—let me adore, do
not exclude me in the fashion of fierce
ideological women, let us rather exclude
ourselves in the kitchen with the maple leaves
falling outside, in comfort, our love
in the altruism of the nearly bodiless,
so pure and yet so powerful, more, more
than our sexes enjoining our fading lust.
Joe-Anne, sorrel-haired, I adore you, I see
and praise your beauty of loving-kindness
beyond every perturbation of the childish
games and nerves, the glands of our declining
objectivities, my adored woman who loves me
in all the ways of the gentle world and the woods.

Copyright © 2006 Hayden Carruth All rights reserved
from Toward the Distant Islands
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission