If I Imagine Love at All

But if I dream of loving, then
my dreams are of snarling strangers. She dreams that…
strange, strange, and corrupt.
—Anne Sexton

If I imagine love at all, I have to imagine
loving a face I’ve never watched
across a pillow, a tabletop, a busy street.

I believe my snarling stranger is coming.
I study dirt and clouds for his long shadow,
for his improbable Valentine, the only heart

he has left. Like mine, it’s been schooled
in poverty after poverty, a more bitter
chocolate you would not swallow.

I have not yet inhaled the hair of this man
who will take me in my too-rough sheets.
I know I won’t hold him while his mother

compares my obsidian edges to her sweet
applesauce son. And I won’t wash his bony
feet, the way Jesus soaped Judas the evening

of his great betrayal. But I can almost feel
the song I will press my forehead against
as it gathers like a thunderstorm in his throat.