After the Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.

He says that he believes a person can love someone

and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.

Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”

think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.

Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.

Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the

murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.

Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice

repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say

to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at

someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to

live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.

I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from

the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.

But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are

a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things

of me even if he’s not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.

Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

MARGINALIA

Here is a woman who has my heart, again and again, forever and always. Her poems were extremely comforting when my grandfather died almost two years ago. Those few months I don’t know if I’ll ever be brave enough to share with the world. But here is something we both can enjoy.

KEEP READING

SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in    The Kingdom of Ordinary Time  by Marie Howe  , published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. (Available on:  Amazon  •  Bookshop )

DESCRIPTION

“Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time―during those periods that are not apparently miraculous?” ( Source )

ABOUT MARIE HOWE

Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York. She worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Howe is the author of    New and Selected Poems    (W. W. Norton, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;    Magdalene    (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award;    The Kingdom of Ordinary Time    (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize;    What the Living Do    (W. W. …  (more)

Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York. She worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Howe is the author of    New and Selected Poems    (W. W. Norton, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;    Magdalene    (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award;    The Kingdom of Ordinary Time    (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize;    What the Living Do    (W. W. Norton, 1998); and    The Good Thief    (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected for the 1987 National Poetry Series. ( Source )

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ENDNOTES

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