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  • 
    • May 2013

    David Caplan, Linda Gregerson, Derek Sheffield, A. E. Stallings, Michelle Boisseau, Peter Cole, and more.

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Poetry Magazine

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When this day returns to me

I will value your heart,

long hurt in long division,

over mine. Mouth above mine too —

say you love me, truth never more

meant, say you are angry.

Words, words we net with our mouths.

Soul is an old thirst but not as first

as the body’s perhaps,

though on bad nights its melancholy

eats us out, to a person.

True, time is undigressing.

Yet true is all we can be:

rhyming you, rhyming me.

Source: Poetry (February 2013).

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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

This poem originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Poetry magazine

• The Last Time I Slept in This Bed
  by Sara Peters
• Meditations in an Emergency
  by Marjorie Perloff
• Temple You
  by Lisa Russ Spaar

• February 2013 Table of Contents
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More about this poem

Biography

Lisa Russ Spaar's most recent book of poems is Vanitas, Rough (December 2012).  A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse:  Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, is due out in March 2013.  Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Weinstein Award for Poetry, the Library of Virginia Award, and a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers. Spaar is a professor at the University of Virginia.

Continue reading this biography

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Poems by Lisa Russ Spaar

• Departures: Chapter One
• How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone
• Midas Passional
• Temple You

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Living, The Body, The Mind, Time & Brevity, Love, Realistic & Complicated

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Audio

• The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Engineering an April

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