Whom You Love

Whom You Love

by Joseph O. Legaspi 

"Tell me whom you love, and I'll tell you 

who you are." -- Creole Proverb

The man whose throat blossoms with spicy chocolates 

Tempers my ways of flurrying 

Is my inner recesses surfacing 

Paints the bedroom blue because he wants to carry me to the skies 

Pear eater in the orchard 

Possesses Whitmanesque urge & urgency 

Boo Bear, the room turns orchestral 

Crooked grin of ice cream persuasion 

When I speak he bursts into seeds & religion 

Poetry housed in a harmonica 

Line dances with his awkward flair 

Rare steaks, onion rings, Maker's on the rocks 

Once-a-boy pilfering grenadine 

Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska 

Wicked at the door of happiness 

At a longed-for distance remains sharply crystalline 

Fragments, but by day's end assembled into joint narrative 

Does not make me who I am, entirely 

Heart like a fig, sliced 

Peonies in a clear round vase, singing 

A wisp, a gasp, sonorous stutter 

Tuning fork deep in my belly, which is also a bell 

Evening where there is no church but fire 

Sparks, particles, chrysalis into memory 

Moth, pod of enormous pleasure, fluttering about on a train 

He knows I don't need saving & rescues me anyhow 

Our often-misunderstood kind of love is dangerous 

Darling, fill my cup; the bird has come to roost

About this Poem:

"Simply, unabashedly, this poem is inspired by, dedicated to, and about my beloved, the Dolly to my Lucinda, my husband." --Joseph O. Legaspi

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press, 2007) and the forthcoming chapbook, Subways (Thrush Press, 2013). He is a co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American poetry. He lives in Queens, NY and works at Columbia University.

"...Legaspi, like William Carlos Williams, can find poetry anywhere. And like his mentor Pablo Neruda he seems able to locate the mysterious and the magical in the most common and overlooked objects. It is difficult to overestimate the daring and resourcefulness required to complete successfully this astonishingly original book. I believe this collection of poetry, so rich in the dailyness of the world and what wisdom we can draw from it, is ample evidence that Joseph O. Legaspi has arrived to a place none of his ancestors in life or in poetry have ever journeyed, and we his readers are the richer for it."--Philip Levine