Love Poem
David Greenglass, who sent his sister
Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair,
Checked his Soviet spy contact
By matching halves of a torn boxtop.
Many couples seem to fit like this:
The natural marriage. Mine was so.
We were in no way identical; but
The edge between us somehow fit,
Wave by wave and tear by tear,
Till the Wheaties logo felt whole.
She is still with me in the house—
I keep seeing her in the bathroom.
Then there are whole categories
Of unequal pairings. I pass over
These, without condemnation.
The one other kind of connection
Is the rarest, hardest and most divine:
The marriage of the tiger and the wolf,
Two supernal animals, irreversibly
Distinct from each other, who agree
To tame each other, and be tamed
By each other—to accept each other
Who can never become each other.
The wolf visits the forest-swamp.
He will never, ever like leeches.
He learns to ambush, after a fashion.
The tiger may trot with him a way,
Far enough but no further, across
The green and anteloped hills,
Tiring and tiresome hills, without
Water or camouflage, until—
Then rest. But be up for the kill,
Or at very least the meal—but
Wolf-pursued, no elk expects
To meet and greet a resting tiger.
The old union, the marriage of nature,
Completed the Platonic sphere,
From jagged halves an ideal whole.
This reaction is a marriage of power,
A magical union, not a biblical union,
Not even like any other like it,
A bubbling flask of something green,
An underground volcano lab
Where unnatural syntheses are made;
Chimeras and unicorns, Frankensteins,
Goats that give the finest merino wool.