Love Sonnet IX
after Pablo Neruda
Love, I am such a central flame, loving solitude
and the way she drives me with her big eyes,
and the violin she burns at the bottom of my well
that fills the stones with your sound of horses.
I thought that together we could be this solitary pain,
one loneliness: a sort of flower on the moon,
drilling its white into our childhood’s windows,
into our entire planet of two people.
But I know you better: seeking love in loud circles
of liars, piling your hair on the slow genitals
of earth, afraid because I have placed this one star
in the palm of your universe: even so, I forgive you.
You could not know what it is to be so alone.
You could not know what it is to be so in love.
by Ryan Dowling