[Portraits of Love cover]

Love Enough

By Eileen Myles

From Portraits of Love

I looked into your big brown eyes the other morning and I realized we've been together for almost six years, and you're simply it, I love you, and I give your long hairy body a stroke. I remember the day we met. I was walking down my street and you were lying there on the sidewalk with your brothers and sisters, sucking on your mother's breasts. I got excited by this scene of natural beauty and then you looked up. You knew me! I felt that knowledge, we shared it and we've been co-vivants ever since. Well there was the exchange of fifty dollars, kind of our agreement. For that you left your family and came with me. The first summer I'd waltz you in the kitchen. There was a song we both liked -- King Pleasure's "I'm in the Mood for Love." Just before we'd crack the bed, before I'd floss we'd do it in the kitchen. Under that sweet note of light, 1990 when everyone was leaving town, had had enough, we were plugging in quietly to something powerful. I remember the first time you saw grass. You almost broke my nose. I was lying on my back, in it, a small patch of it wrapped in hurricane link fence towered over by the large ugly public housing with balconies and great parking on First Avenue. I was comfortable with grass because I had lived on the earth for forty years, had known its pleasures seemingly forever, but you were new in it, were galloping in a rage of pleasure, hardly separating me from it so you stormed right up onto my face but you weighed less than twenty pounds then so you merely hurt me with your glee, but did not mangle. How you loved the shore! Cherry Grove, those small formal wavelets were monsters to you. It was almost cruel shoving nature at you and watching your unchained perceptions taking off.

Once I took off for a weekend that same first summer -- as if I had my freedom anymore. I left you in a friend's care and when I returned my home was smeared with little ropes of turd all over the floor. The friend didn't understand that you didn't know how to be alone. Am a lesbian mother? No I think I am your lover. You were part of the deal after that. I haven't done the best job, leaving you with wild boys for your second summer and your nipples looked scarred and I still hope it was some psoriasis rather than the ritual sex that I suspected. You are the jealous sort. I had a guest for a while and the first night you ran round the bed that held by my and her hairless bodies, barking and barking in a horror of displacement. As long as the guest lay in the bed, you were to find some other amenable piece of furniture. It was odd, you thought she was the boss for a while because she never laid with you. It's all sorted out now. A cool breeze surrounds the black-and-white female and the kind of tanned pinky one. I don't feel shy about your qualities. Let me describe them. White feet: four. Black tail with occasional white splashes. Black back, pink belly with sweet pale pink nipples. The lower belly a brighter pink, and still rather hairless from the surgery which I shall mention later. The head: a crest of whiteness pouring over the small part in your skull. I love your vulnerability. I place my fingers on your forehead, softly kneading the river of perhaps cartilage that must enable the wonderful range of expressions with which you greet the world, your living dog mask. Before we get to the honest eyes let me mention the twin shrub of peanut-butter-tan-brow, little bumps of love and freedom that serve as echo chambers for the visuality of your eyes. Those. Always red, always sad, swimming through the sadness of what Rilke calls a dog's knowledge of death, but I say no. What she sees is a tunnel that recognizes no distinction between the initial blast of vivacity and the ultimate sinking into a world of grainy still things, the silly dream gone. She is in partnership with the utmost of veiny branches of time. What looks like sadness is a simple melancholy of knowing -- it's all we've got and we're such fools in our clawing attempts to fixity, preservation, grandiose pit stops. She is wet with breath and people croon what a sad-looking puppy. And then they flash a peek at me and say we look alike. I shuffle my feet. I learned some.

Under her jaw is dirty white velvet. I don't keep my dog very clean. She smells like corn. Each foot bears three strong pads, balls of dog, rubbery marbles that lift her ever so slightly off the rug or the bumpy cement. One year or two her pads grew raw, chafed, bled, and I felt helpless. I know love. When she turned one when I was forty-one. Three in 1993, six in '96, and I pray she lives till the year 2000, when she'll be ten and I turn fifty. I see an orange sun bobbing on the horizon and we move slow to that special land that ever retreats just beyond our melancholic visions. Once I dreamed she would be my immortality, or some continuation, but I watched her suffer intercourse twice and no "off-spring" came forth. The vet said some dogs don't want puppies. I didn't. But I got you and I think we're okay watching the line. I mean the line of the sea or the day or the window. The falling darkness and even keeping watch over small sounds in the night that seem to talk about us in our wraggled bed. Our limbs tossed, our mothers gone, our lives complete. I eat my cereal, you're grunting in your bowl. It's what I've wanted all my life -- a female all my own. Yet I know I will betray you.

Eileen Myles's newest book is Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems (Black Sparrow, 1995). With Liz Katz she co-edited the hit anthology The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading , from Semiotext(e), which won a 1995 Lambda Literary Award. Currently Myles is working on Cool for You, a trilogy of novels that comprise a female human history. Look for it in your bookstore soon. Rosie's currently asleep on the couch.

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