One day my professor held me
after class, marched me to his office, and
shut the door. Never write the word love
in a poem, he said, tight-lipped. My face glowed
like a branding iron. He offered no other note.
I couldn’t look directly at him
without thinking of the previous week
when we both came at the same time,
him inside me, then gently lapping
mine from the fresh pasture of hair on my chest.
I wrote terrible poems then, but I was
beautiful, another word
he would have chastised me for in his office
then trilled as a kulning on his sofa:
You’re beautiful, beautiful, you’re beautiful.
Maybe he was right. Love and poetry
mix about as well as Baileys and Guinness.
I was eager to chug the lot of it, no thought
to consequences. There were none.
Only now that I find myself in his position
do I see how lonely he must have been.
Pity isn’t right, but I think of him
when a student turns in a poem
with the word love, as I fence it in red ink,
write in the margin:
                                           Beautiful.