Sustain
1.
My love plays piano and his foot hovers above the pedal.
Sustain, they call it when the note floats
like a basketball player suspended in air,
or a question whose purpose is to remain unanswered.
Theres only this low keening urgency,
the sound of mourning doves,
drone and descant, murmur and coo.
I am learning to rest inside the word enough
its rough leathery consonants, its f of finitude.
2.
To bear up under
pain, or the memory of pain
repeating itself, like scales, as if we were practicing
to never do again what
of course we will do again
3.
I love you
the way language loves the tongue,
the way a sentence loves its verb,
and parentheses love whatever they enclose.
I love you the way notes love the fingers that play them,
the way the ear loves sound
as well as the silence that comes after.
I love you the way a bridge loves land,
anchoring itself to the river banks so it can arch
over waters too rough to swim.
I love you the way an apple loves the teeth that bite it,
and a worm loves the earth it turns.
4.
After divorce
we sustained heavy losses,
multiple injuries,
head wounds, trauma, shock.
But you cant sustain shock.
You have to let it go, or move on into deeper waters.
5.
Give us this day our stone-ground wholegrain toast with organic butter,
our fair trade coffee, our soy creamer, our free-range eggs,
our morning paper with its dismaying headlines,
our kissing and teasing in the kitchen.
Let it all go on, just
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poem by Alison Luterman
Added by Poetry Lover
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