On Love Poems

On Love Poems
 
I'd like to write a poem in which
the hero with the lazy eye
falls close to love with a woman
standing under a stop sign
in the worst kind of weather,

falls close to love with the outline
of ordinary thighs under a rain soaked
skirt, his eye sidling up
towards her ample waist,
plain face and her hat, worn

at an awkward angle. And I would like
the hero to come toward her,
step in a puddle as he crosses the road,
and I would like the whole
of the blemished world to cease

existing between them: the pocked
concrete sidewalk, the whorled
knots of the trees, the nail holes
in the telephone poles, the crevices
and cuts - smoothed over.

Then I would like storybooks rewritten
to reflect the fact that no one is whole,
the endings left wide open, the possibility
of loss always there, hanging
like a street light.

We think we know the world and imagine
there is order in it, but this turning
the corner into love is as much a myth
as anything - the man with the lazy eye
and the women who walk by him.

Still, what astounds me most in this
isn't our tireless wanting, the old
college try. It isn't the half-life
we try not to fall into. It's
how we find each other

remarkable, despite the absence 
of wisdom or humour or pity, despite
the absence of attributes we cannot name.
All of us wanting just enough and searching
the pockets of the world to find it.

Aislinn Hunter