~
How the Heart Lies
I walk with one eye on the mountains
and skies, the other on the trail so I don’t
step in shit. I love you like that,
dazzled by the halo around your head
one minute, then scraping your crap
from my shoe soles the next. Your charm
can be like noticing a new petroglyph,
but then spotting bullet holes in the
pictograph that someone has used
as a target. I love you like that, hard
as a varnished rockface one minute,
pockmarked to hell the next. Black
as the coffee you serve in bed each morning,
annoying as the stench of cat urine
from a nearby litterbox. I love you like that
too: buttery bread out of the oven one minute,
cold crusts jellied to a plate the next.
For better or worse we vowed that late
afternoon outside Taos, where I surprised
you with an unrehearsed pantomime
to Bruno Mars’ “Marry Me.” I love you,
silly as getting married for something
fun to do, but embarrassed by your request
for Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance
with Somebody.” At least my song
had back-up singers. I love you, sweet
as that two-tiered mocha cake, as
farm-fresh raspberries, but nasty
as the mold harbored at the bottom
of the container. That’s how we turn:
from hot to cold, from on to off, hour
by hour throughout our days, that fine
line of skirting the Gorge, one misstep
away from being out of reach. That’s how
I love you, deep and shallow, wide
and narrow, mountaintop to desert floor.
You claim I am full of shit, but that
is exactly how you love me too.
~
Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Bearing the Mask, and 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso. Poems have appeared recently in El Palacio, Limp Wrist, Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, Kingfisher, and Modern Haiku. He lives in Albuquerque, where he leads the chapter of the New Mexico State Poetry Society.