Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,
the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,
the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually
living it. This time around, let the only fireworks
be those kindled beneath your hands, or mine. O let us have a long,
long time to grow used to each other, many mornings
of tea & toast & reading our terrible first drafts aloud. There will be
clouds, but let them be like those I saw from a prop plane
taking off over a cornfield at dawn: deeply banked & tinted all rose
& purple & gold. Let your arms hold me
a thousand nights, even if it gets old. You & I will grow old, Love,
we have grown old. But this last chance
in our late decades could be like the Pleiades, winter stars seen by
Sappho, Hesiod & Galileo & now by you & me.
Let us be boring like a hollow drill coring deep into the earth to find
its most secret mineral treasures.
Like a constellation that’s always been there, a burning braid of stars
boring through space at the speed of light,
the kind of wild held between bits of cosmic dust—infinite—that will
never stop moving, nor cease to exist.
Rebecca Foust’s eight books include You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems and Only. Her poems won the 2024 James Dickey Prize and the New Ohio Review, Pablo Neruda, James Hearst, and Poetry International prizes in recent years.
