LOVE IS A HABIT

LOVE IS A HABIT

LOVE IS A HABIT

Love is a habit, like brushing your teeth or cleaning the bath.
And if love is a habit, is grieving one too? What shall I replace
the habit of loving and grieving you with?
                                                                          (A habit built up slow,
like the accretions on a pearl, grey and baroque and expensive;

or the gloss on a dining table, hours of elbow grease and polish;
or skin sloughing off imperceptibly, renewed from beneath;
or the silent unfurling of a baby, cell by cell.)
                                                                              (But
growth in the womb is by division, not addition; by one simple cell

splitting and replicating itself a million million times, till suddenly some know:
to shape a nose, and nose hairs, and a channel to the back of the mouth
that is slippery, and a tongue with nodules for tasting,
and teeth that are hard, but living.)
                                                               Love is a habit, and grieving one too.

But I want to hold on to the grieving as a way of holding on to you.
That first Sunday without you, the September sky was cold and empty,
despite the jasmine struggling to bloom.

I’d never lived a day without you in the world;
now the city for me was empty.
It hardly seemed possible.