True Love True like the sky you can depend on to always be something. True like a lily ready to tilt vertical to horizontal. True like a bare foot to cold morning ground even when there’s no place to go. True like the bounding dog between wondering what’s for dinner and the possibility on the counter gone in a flash. True like cats sleeping in inconvenient for you places. True like mice that keep finding new ways into the house, packrats that persist enough to eat the wires under the hood of your tired car. True like all of us just trying to get by. True like algebraic formulas, refrigerators still humming steady after 25 years, all manner of box springs, bonsai junipers, boisterous home teams winning homecoming. True like cabinet hinges, blocks of sun on the kitchen floor that’s been mopped or not, and high-jumping squirrels at 3 a.m. True love is not made of wings and wind, throttled down by hail. It doesn’t crease like wrapping paper taped wrong, won’t fall to pieces like popsicle stick vows. No, it’s true like chocolate cake, the best falafels, Caesar salad with true anchovies while you look into each other’s true eyes and say again, laughing, let’s do it anyway, we can always sleep later, catch up when we’re truly dead.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 23 books, including Miriam’s Well, a novel; Everyday Magic: A Field Guide to the Mundane and Miraculous, and Following the Curve, poetry. Her previous work includes The Divorce Girl, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet, a bioregional memoir on cancer and community; and six poetry collections, including the award-winning Chasing Weather with photographer Stephen Locke. Founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 