THE WOMAN WHO LOVED THINGS

A woman finally learned how to love things, so things learned
how to love her too as she pressed herself to their shining sides,
their porous surfaces. She smoothed along walls until walls
smoothed along her too, a joy, a climax, this flesh
against plaster, the sweet suck of consenting molecules.

Sensitive men and women became followers, wrapping themselves
in violet, pasting her image over their fast hearts,
pressing against walls until walls came to appreciate
differences in molecules. This became a worship.
They became a love. A church. A cult. A way of being.

But, of course, it had to be: the woman's love kept growing
until she was loved by trees and appliances, from toasters
to natural obstacles, until her ceiling shook loose to send kisses,
sheets wound tight betwixt her legs, and floorboards broke free
of their nails, straining their lengths over her sleeping.

She awoke and drove out of town alone. In love, rocks flew
through her car windows, then whole hillsides slid, loosening
with desire. Her car shatttered its shaft to embrace her,
but she ran from the wreckage, calling all the sweet things
as she waited in a field of strangely complacent daisies.

She spoke of love until losing her breath, and the things
trilled to feel that loss too, at last, sighing in thingness.
She fell down, and the things fell down around her. She cried,
«Christ!» and the things cried «Christ!» in their things-hearts
until everything living and unliving wonderfully collided.


«The woman who loved things», de Cathleen Calbert, in The Best American Poetry - 1995