The Inconditions of Love

Lost softness ...
makes a curse. And makes a sugar of
The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.
-Gwendolyn Brooks,1945

Getting inside, penetration, warmth, wetness,
Washing in the dusty gravel,
Dirty brown stream of a muddy basin
Where brass and gold catch fire.
Here, the peacock has her patient hour in the dust,
Her deliberate angular movement masking power.
The city goose too has her dignity and grace
Despite living close and failing to clean up.
Wild beauty in our midst has a doubleness
In which there is neither wiping nor the washing of hands.
Indoors, too close again -
Bed frame slaps the wall,
Marrs with dark rubbing
The chalk sky bedroom blue,
Painted this fiftieth time by us,
Last in a parade of lovers,
Hanging curtains to soften the light,
That spills like our unpacked boxes onto the floor.
Odd shirts and past fashions,
Underwear, our rumpled indignity
Discloses in the half and fading light
Of our afternoon’s desire
The indeliberate, indelicate intentions of our wandering.
And these, the conditions and inconditions of love
Like wave and trough bring us
The moles, the beauty marks, the crooked smile,
The bruises purple on the muscled flesh.
Are they the flower flecks of passion,
The tinge of honored deaths,
The evidence of desire turned back upon itself,
Demanding its way with force and push not play?
With love’s inconditions -
The fear, the ache, the hunt, the push -
Sugar comes
Into our cramped, shamed, holy, private spaces.