There’s poetry in this business of love,
in the slow dancing fall into bed,
when, after all our false attempts,
the earnest lines we’ve heard and said,
two clumsy, tumbling, unlike things
are finally, briefly one.
There’s no need then to say that this
is the cause and worth of everything;
we can stop trying to get it right.
The room we’re in is all we know
and all we’ll ever need to know,
the finished verses, the kiss goodnight.
Chelsea Rathburn was a finalist for the 2000 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 21 December 2002, on page 48
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