The true sugar of love
The Sugar Of Love Disappears
She goes to Munich on business and buys you a heart-shaped gingerbread cookie, which she carries back to the hotel and packs into her bag four days later for the train ride home to Luzern, which she unpacks at home, carefully wraps and repacks into a box, which she then ships to America where you open it and your room fills with the scent of gingerbread from Munich as you read the rounded words Ich Liebe Dich spelled out in white sugar frosting like pearl skywriting swelling across a confectionate faultline, which you can’t eat because to do so would devour the metaphor of love and the metaphor of love should never be devoured while the savor of its cherishing is yet young and frolicsome on such full lips, while sugarmites thrive and find their way to break down the nutrient chains that keep lovers and polypeptides connected in some invisible and mysterious way that matters only as much as the reason birds cannot fly upside down and water doesn’t seep from the salt mines of the eyes, so you straighten the ribbon through the holes, hang it from a nail, look at it everyday for a month, then once every other day, then once a week until it becomes ordinary along with everything else you’ve collected or been given except that sometimes your lovelorn eyes land on it and it holds your cursive attention long enough to mouth the words Ich Liebe Dich and imagine them in her mouth, where your mouth once foraged for gold and treasure and the motherlodes of plunder, imagine their perfect soundings as if summoned from a rift of abyssal pain, a deep deep beauty in blonde and blue, and then the phone or the mail or the thousand unmatters that merit your breaching from such immersion, and the hook snags you up and up into shallow minutiae and the mites wait patiently for you to pack it, pack it up carefully into a box that you will forget to open until a year and a half later when the smoke of your disappointment rises up and out of the room like the curled spray of seaworn words that gulls and mites take into their mouths, the Ich Liebe Dichs they devour and churn and grind with their mitochondrial teeth until nothing but shell and trenchwater remains, no trace of krill or kiss, no white flume of love etched in frantic foam or the pelagic sweat of chimneyed whales uprushed from chasmic realms sludged with all the sugar love ever sent to the bottom of a sunken heart, a place even bathyscaphs dare not venture, where tales abound of monsters and a time when adventurers tracked too close to mysteries better left that way, a fabled land where the sugar, the true sugar of love never disappears.
Joseph Gallo
June 10, 2006
She goes to Munich on business and buys you a heart-shaped gingerbread cookie, which she carries back to the hotel and packs into her bag four days later for the train ride home to Luzern, which she unpacks at home, carefully wraps and repacks into a box, which she then ships to America where you open it and your room fills with the scent of gingerbread from Munich as you read the rounded words Ich Liebe Dich spelled out in white sugar frosting like pearl skywriting swelling across a confectionate faultline, which you can’t eat because to do so would devour the metaphor of love and the metaphor of love should never be devoured while the savor of its cherishing is yet young and frolicsome on such full lips, while sugarmites thrive and find their way to break down the nutrient chains that keep lovers and polypeptides connected in some invisible and mysterious way that matters only as much as the reason birds cannot fly upside down and water doesn’t seep from the salt mines of the eyes, so you straighten the ribbon through the holes, hang it from a nail, look at it everyday for a month, then once every other day, then once a week until it becomes ordinary along with everything else you’ve collected or been given except that sometimes your lovelorn eyes land on it and it holds your cursive attention long enough to mouth the words Ich Liebe Dich and imagine them in her mouth, where your mouth once foraged for gold and treasure and the motherlodes of plunder, imagine their perfect soundings as if summoned from a rift of abyssal pain, a deep deep beauty in blonde and blue, and then the phone or the mail or the thousand unmatters that merit your breaching from such immersion, and the hook snags you up and up into shallow minutiae and the mites wait patiently for you to pack it, pack it up carefully into a box that you will forget to open until a year and a half later when the smoke of your disappointment rises up and out of the room like the curled spray of seaworn words that gulls and mites take into their mouths, the Ich Liebe Dichs they devour and churn and grind with their mitochondrial teeth until nothing but shell and trenchwater remains, no trace of krill or kiss, no white flume of love etched in frantic foam or the pelagic sweat of chimneyed whales uprushed from chasmic realms sludged with all the sugar love ever sent to the bottom of a sunken heart, a place even bathyscaphs dare not venture, where tales abound of monsters and a time when adventurers tracked too close to mysteries better left that way, a fabled land where the sugar, the true sugar of love never disappears.
Joseph Gallo
June 10, 2006
post-time 1:26 AM
4 Comments:
Sometimes, despite all outward appearances and lives well lived, the true sugar of love does remain. And we're all better for it.
I want to hug you with all the warmth I have to give.
I want to give you a big hug too.
A dear friend of mine wondered which of the two following interpretative queries about this poem was true:
...(is) the "sugar of love" that need inside the heart that doesn't disappear just because that particular object of love is gone...
... (or is it) the residual love for that person, and only that person, that won't disappear, which then prevents the heart from loving again in that way?
I replied that she had exacted perfectly the heart of the piece in that both interpretations were equally true. One may be more true than the other at any given time, but I would not be able to tell any of you which was which, or when.
Thanks to all three of you for commenting on the poem. Hugs to you each.
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