Overflow

A poem about love's excess.

Love is often imagined as a kind of rescue. But perhaps the deeper love is the one that does not know how to save anyone. The one that enters quietly, through habit: a cup of water, a halted step, a breath held too carefully behind a door. Care does not always arrive whole, sometimes it carries the shape of the thing that wounded it. And sometimes we give too much because we are carrying too much.

What remains is compassion for the strange, imperfect forms care can take: for all the people who believe they are only surviving, while something rooted and patient keeps accepting what overflows from them.

“Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d.” —Alfred Lord Tennyson

Overflow

I was bought on a Saturday of errands,
wedged between toilet paper and fresh milk,
labeled by name, not age.
I learned that humans enter rooms 
believing history begins 
when they can touch it.

But on the windowsill I had already began 
counting the room differently:
by light, by thirst,
by the names of sounds.

A slammed cabinet
has a different song
than a closed door.
A kettle left screaming
means one kind of loneliness;
a kettle forgotten cold
means another.

Then there were the smaller sounds:
a sleeve dragged across a face,
breath held behind a door,
footsteps stopping before my pot.

The boy in the gray sweatshirt
waters me after crying.
I know by the salt,
by the careful breath 
of someone trying not to make noise
inside his own life.

He pours too much. Again.
The water gathers at my roots
and I hold the excess
in the dark mouth
of the soil.

This is how I learned love
among people:
they give what is drowning them.

Miriam H. Monarres

Photo by Pexels.

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Love,

Miriam