A Litany for Love
1.
Love is clouds dropping long bombs of rain.
Deliver me.
2.
Love is summer.
A rattlesnake unscrolls
from the orange tree,
tongues the grass.
The blessed smell
of split blades.
Deliver me.
3.
In every season, a lover’s slip-up.
A winter-God’s tongue presses against
the sides of my heart: I’ve never loved you.
Each cell crackles into prayer.
Deliver me.
4.
April: the mirror holds my fog-blurred face.
May: my face becomes a silken flower.
Now my heart’s a cloud, raining through the body.
Must be June. In the glade, summer
lets loose its boiling whistle.
Deliver me.
5.
Is praise too much in these times?
We spend hours tangled in mind’s endless webbing—
not enough in the body’s chambers and chimneys.
Love is an earlobe dipped in a cold ocean.
Is the sun through prayer hands.
Two lovers brush each other’s paradoxical skin.
Deliver me.
6.
Love craves to see beauty everywhere:
but this to the senses
is a dance of surfaces.
Each pheromone curls up the nose
into the mind’s bright delirium.
But beneath beauty’s skin,
what hungers? What feeds on our need
to be consumed?
Deliver me.
7.
Love is a surgeon slicing a body
into rivers, revealing soft pipework.
Are we supposed to love this wormrot,
this material stench? What happens
when we stare into whirlpools
of bile?
Perhaps love demands we see all,
and the heart sweats out a vision
of an angel, wings tucked, sliding down an artery.
Deliver me.
8.
But there is poetry
pregnant as gardens,
the tireless occupation of bees,
art and music,
desire and hope and—
Fuck!
I left the oven on!
Deliver me.
9.
Shuffle along, a tall vicar says
herding us through a wooden door
into a glade where I fall
into a grave of open books.
Wherever love buries itself in language,
Deliver me.
10.
Sometimes, all I wish to do is tie myself
in love’s ribbons. How it celebrates
in the shiver of every leaf, quivers before lips
meet, distorts the body
into rapture’s harsh silence.
Deliver me.
11.
Love’s fierce choosing
is a kind of praise, isn’t it?
Hold me tight. I wish to sing:
Deliver me.
12.
Love is what spools from throat to mouth,
gold-thick like a waxing moon,
gifting nighttime honey.
Deliver me.
13.
Bone by bone my body becomes a desert.
Deliver me.
14.
The sun blasts its trumpet.
Ash falls over my slowly closing lips and eyes.
The quiet gospel of daily bread.
Love is an omelette that tastes like ash.
My body: its gift. My heart: its welcoming.
Love is the dirge. Love is the trumpet.
O God, o dear God,
from all that is love,
Deliver me.
Nathan Hassall believes in poetry's transformational potential. He weaves dreams, altered states, numinous experiences, and the natural world into his work. Hassall's poems have appeared in Moria, Ghost City Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Inflectionist Review, and more. He is the 2023-2025 Poet Laureate of Malibu, California, and is the Host of The Poetry Vessel Podcast, available on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@nathanhassallpoetry