If You Must Hide Yourself From Love

If You Must Hide Yourself From Love

By Christopher Salerno

 

It is important to face the rear of the train

as it leaves the republic. Not that all

 

departing is yearning. First love is

a factory. We sleep in a bed that had once

 

been a tree. Nothing is forgot.

Yet facts, over time, lose their charm,

 

warned a dying Plato. You have to isolate

the lies you love. Are we any less

 

photorealistic? I spot in someone's Face-

book sonogram a tiny dictum

 

full of syllogisms. One says: all kisses come

down to a hole in the skull,

 

toothpaste and gin; therefore your eyes

are bull, your mouth is a goal.

 

 

About the Poem

 

"Love hurts, warned The Everly Brothers. Especially when we let passion trump reason. After all, as Plato suggests, there are any number of available 'beds in nature' to make one's lovelife more complicated. As humans we struggle with the difference between physical, emotional, and intellectual love. Sometimes we simply need to bail out of the whole enterprise, and sometimes, after a great pain, we may need to censor it from our lives. To see sentimentality for what it is. Only then do we come back (to love) even stronger."—Christopher Salerno

 

 

About the Poet

 

Christopher Salerno was born on June 13, 1975, in Somerville, New Jersey. He received an MA from East Carolina University and an MFA from Bennington College.

 

Salerno is the author of Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize; ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), winner of the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize; Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize; and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006).

In the judge’s citation for the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize, D. A. Powell writes, “Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we’re missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating.”

 

Salerno has also received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He currently serves as an editor at Saturnalia Books and teaches at William Paterson University. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey.