Lord I Thought at Least You’d Be Here by Elizabeth Metzger
Lord I Thought at Least You’d Be Here
Elizabeth MetzgerWhen the others knew you I knew of you.
Maybe you need to be reminded
how we met
whether it was romantic?Make it better
I hear you singing
with my earmake it better
make it betterWhen I lay next to you in life
only you had the life.Already you survive me.
Death after all that forethought is so green
in the dark like a wet kissbut Lord
I would give you up still for a person.
MARGINALIA
1.
My first encounter with the divine I had a yearning to write about it. It’s not anything grand—just a pocket of grace at a difficult time. Can I even call it divine, I asked myself. Maybe it’s just part of the ebb and flow of life. Maybe.
2.
Have you ever felt both a sense of longing and imbalance when face-to-face with the unknown? Have you ever confronted your mortal fragility and even wished sometimes to be in the after-all-this of things, where nothing hurt?
3.
What is transient but tangible. What weighs down your heart so that you remain anchored to this world. Tell me: what would you give up for your person?
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ABOUT ELIZABETH METZGER
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever (forthcoming from Milkweed in Fall 2026) and Lying In (Milkweed, 2023), as well as The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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Wayne A Gilbert
the weight is wait(ing): the denouement? desire.
what a great question!
T.
Thank you Wayne. I’m glad you’re here.
T.