I thought I would keep going without you, <br />stay in these few rooms, stare at the chairs I hate <br />without you. I thought I would go on like that, <br />alone with my days, bitter, smoking into the steering wheel <br />toward Alhambra, or Pomona, driving out there <br />to build house frames, to work machines, driving <br />Interstate 10 into gray hell. <br />I thought I would go on like that <br />full of wretched conceptions, my petty spite, <br />dreams of illness and a toy window I am finally <br />small enough to fit through― I thought I would go on <br />without you. But I waited. To have come this far <br />I had to find things to compare with you, just as <br />I compare myself with those rivers that run <br />with dead things, and with the most fertile <br />liquid, and with dark fish tossing from the depth. <br />I started to trust in you, in the tiny flower of shining glass <br />over the pause of breath within you― just as <br />inside the leaf there is another in the pause of wind, <br />a transparent leaf which is the one <br />that is more real. I started to trust in you <br />as I trust in those things that surrounded you <br />in the mist that moved over the wisteria while we talked, <br />surrounded by the clouds mauve color, as your hair <br />surrounded your throat, the blossoms of the pomegranate <br />turning slightly metallic, as the breeze surrounded us <br />in the dusk, in late spring. I started to trust in you, <br />in what comes from either side of you <br />impassively given― without knowledge, <br />without request. I trust in the petals that open <br />on the invisible hedge.<br /><br />Doren Robbins<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/from-either-side-of-you-love-poem/
