Today's poem is by Xiao Yue Shan

the man I love ran off with everything except my poems
       

there was a thought hanging like a trick of light on the door
as if it could fall at any second. we knew if it fell
it would make a sound like water. the thought communicated
with its wayward tracings that it did not know to whom
it should return. the door was a fiction of the thought,
who had changed it from nothing to have something
to hang to. my hair is yellow in the fiction. then it is black
almost as fact. your hair is walnut in the photograph,
until fact throws a wild light upon it. doors are a fact
of their swinging, and water has noiseless ways of
entering the room. your eyes are what filled the doorway
to pieces. in a book about love gertrude stein
says that her portrait from picasso is the only reproduction
which is always I. I, I want to take I, back from I. from
your eye of doors which lead powerfully into silence,
and an illegible, animal approach of resemblance.
the immortality desire inflicts is the perpetual living-on
of somewhere other, just as a door can only ever be
open or closed, never neither. just as fictions come to live
side by side with fact, and hair greys sometimes in sleeping.
the days all rest around in halves like oranges,
I, and I, and I laying between them, being as much someone
as they are anyone.

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from then telling be the antidote
Tupelo Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission