6 Love Poems from the Film “Closer”
One
“I love everything about you that
hurts.”
Two
love
we throw the word around
as if it was supposed to mean something, all by itself
but “where is this love?
where is it?
I can’t see it. I can’t touch it. I can’t feel it.”
Show me,
with your eyes, with your hands, with your choices and your doings
solid things, real things, concrete things.
Show me
don’t just say it, if you don’t mean it, if you had doubt it, even yourself
if you just needed me to love you in return, throwing those
pretty words around
‘show me,’ she said, ‘don’t test me, show me’
“Where is this love?”
Three
“What were you so sad about?”
“Life.”
“…And what’s that?”
Four
he holds her and she cries, the last whimpering exhale before the end,
“no one will ever love you as much as I do.”
no one will ever love you as much as I do.
she wanted to yell, to scream, to shriek,
to hold his face so close to hers, that he wouldn’t be able to escape
the heat of the words, coming from the very core of her, warm and alive
the truth of the words,
throbbing and beating, hanging, half limp in the air,
coagulating long enough for him to see, to read over, to read over again
for him to understand
no one will ever love you the way I do,
the whole of you, the details of you, the bleeding, pulsing, gory bits of you.
(don’t let me go)
but she knew that it would not be, for it had always been this way,
for she who loved too bluntly.
she understood something about love, that was rarely ever fully realized,
“let the more loving one be me.”
Inhale.
Five
“This man comes into the cafe today and he says,
‘hey, waitress,
what’re you waiting for?’
so I go,
‘I’m waiting for a man to come in here and fuck me sideways,
with a beautiful line like that.’”
Six
“And so it [was]
just like you said it would be”
the premier breathe of every love story, two words, barely audible
since dawn, since the first pink flamingo sunrise
over the baby blue sea.
“hello, stranger.”
(from there you knew there was only drowning,) all that you had were
handicapped visions
under the rising and falling of crystal-lined tides
amounting to: blurred, rose-tinted clarity.
and then one day, strangers again,
meeting on the intersection of a crossing that said
look right.
“I don’t love you anymore,” she would say, “goodbye.”
lover-stranger, stranger-darling,
goodbye.
lost in a fish bowl or in the sea, it would have hurt either way, she said
despite it all, in the end, it was true, “just like you said it would be,
life [went] easy on me,
most
of the time.”
