To have without holding

Learning to love differently is hard, 
love with the hands wide open, love 
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind 
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds 
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open 
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives. 

It hurts to thwart the reflexes 
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let 
go again and again. It pesters to remember 
the lover who is not in the bed, 
to hold back what is owed to the work 
that gutters like a candle in a cave 
without air, to love consciously, 
conscientiously, concretely, constructively. 

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing 
on the cold and hot winds of our breath, 
as we make and unmake in passionate 
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

--Marge Piercy (1936- ), American activist, poet, environmentalist, and feminist