Even though I love you, I must leave you
As much as I love New Orleans and I love New Orleans, I love traveling too – what better thing than to have New Orleans as my home base and have the world beckoning. I text with a friend in Istanbul right now and felt the big pull to return to this wonderful city. Then on the poem site that I visit, I saw this perfect poem:
The Going
The cloth edge of certainty
has shredded down to this:
God and love are real,
but very far away.
If I go to Istanbul, will I return?
That is not one of the permitted questions.
When I go to Istanbul, how will I bear to return?
I could slip into the small streets
that lead away from the souk, then run east
to the high plain and the Caucasus—
It’s all alone, the returning,
the going. The cloth,
a soft holland whose blocks of blue and lemon
once cheered me in a skirt,
now dries dishes. God and love
are very far away, farther even
than the mountains in the east.
APRIL BERNARD