The origin is a narrow aperture,
arrow slit or loop
that’s come to mean an opening
in any structure, be it castle
or marriage. So when my lover
spits on his finger to wet
what is wet already,
and holds my hand,
plowing his beauty,
its foreign power, into me,
and when the hatch at the center
of my heart flies open,
I am unhinged,
and you, inches away
are watching.
Fidelity’s loophole.
You have never seen me so
ecstatic and love me
more for what you see.
On our sofa I pull the throw
over myself and you under join me
in the small dark,
animals in a tunnel of wet leaves.
We are ourselves again,
the festival of madness behind us.
Though I still pine, your word,
for the one I barely know and now
it seems can’t live without.
Give desire a boundary
and it sails across.
Marry it and see how quiet
and still, growing downward
in deep soil. We have
no idea how to live. Our last
decade before the work
of age begins in earnest.
Jacqueline Berger’s fifth book of poetry, Left at the Ruin, was published in 2024 by Terrapin Books. Her previous books include The Day You Miss Your Exit, The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Things That Burn, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize; and The Mythologies of Danger, winner of the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Awards Poetry Prize. Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’sWriters Almanac as well as in numerous anthologies and journals. She is a professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and has recently relocated to the California Central Coast with her husband.
