I’d say consult your biology book
but textbooks never cover looks
exchanged across the lunchroom table:
the language is too . . . clinical,
no boy meets girl, just sperm meets egg.
I guess by now you’ve discovered legs
as if they were a phenomenon
never before stumbled upon.
This doesn’t make you Ponce de Léon.
You’re just a part of the old pattern
everyone sees, but no one learns
in time to do them any good.
Some things I’ve never understood:
how certain men among us choose,
as in a game of duck-duck-goose,
a random gal and marry her.
They practice on a terrier,
then work at rearing a real kid.
The marriage clearly on the skids,
they see the ingrate brat through college,
then call it quits at middle age
with a dead dog and double mortgage.
See how a woman yearns for the prince
that Disney promised her, convinces
herself he lives next door—poor guy,
he only wanted to get by
unscathed in life, but now he lives
with royalty who won’t forgive
his falling short of her ideal.
They bicker over every meal.
They’re just a part of the old pattern
everyone sees, but no one learns.
Myself, I never met their doom.
I never had to share my room.
I’ve circled all the small round earth,
found only once a woman worth
a second date, but she belonged
to a man who bought her silk sarongs
and threw rose petals at her feet.
My one brown penny could scarce compete.
It hurt to lose her years ago
and pains me even now to know
the blessed infinities we share
are lost to that hot hemisphere
I left behind when love left me.
That’s when I first began to see
we’re all a part of an old pattern.
Unlike the others, I have learned.
Do you and I and everything
that crawls the earth amount to nothing
but head-on collisions of egg and sperm,
an accident of germ on germ?
I’d rather say our hearts are fish
in a Sargasso sea that thrash
to lure the bigger fish we pray
will swallow us and do away
with all this floating in the deep
that’s so dark dawn wakes us to new sleep,
for we can never close our eyes
to the cold and dark that paralyze,
for lids would only lid the black
with black . . . and magnify our lack
of wherewithal to merely move.
Welcome annihilation. That’s love.