Public Republic

Jeremy Paden

Photo: petitefox

bearing his heart in grief and all Denmark
passing by him as he sobs in the street,

old and young embarrassed to see a lover
lost in something he does not understand.

What is this that beckons him, that will not
release his heart? O despised pangs of love.

How many times did he approach her door,
turn back, return to knock, only to turn

again toward home and run a block or two,
then, breathless on a bench, sit, working out

whether love is a choice, whether the heart
can be tamed, taught, trained, contained in what it

wants, or whether the heart wants what it wants,
if this wanting is a fulmination that leaves the body

stunned, stumbling, stuttering, at a loss
and alone in the blindness that follows the flash,

wanting only to be hit again by this force
beyond the mind’s capacity to comprehend?

He returns, resolved, to speak to her again,
but thinking too precisely on the grunting,

the sweating of ordinary life, he stands
paralyzed, because should he go to her,

should she invite him in, listen to him,
he knows this opening would also be

a closing, the beginning of the long
decline, ending in domestication.