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POETRY CONTEST

A STRANGE LOVE

From above the country spread like an idea,
something dark and ugly that had my chest within its jaws
and when it clamped down hard I thought the pain I felt was hunger,
although there might not even be a difference.
Below, only the fields of wheat and corn felled by the rain looked real
and a girl somewhere among the busy streets
who said she read Marquez in Spanish and knew about true love.
She told me this under a mystic sky of fog and dust
in the middle of a city turning the soft edge of midnight.
It was good to be with a woman then, brushing her arm,
eyeing the suggestion of her bare breasts, the tragedy
of that low plunging line until a fear trembled me
as if the two of us were trailed by the ghost of someone else.
None of it made sense except the gypsy woman selling flowers in the rain,
red roses dying slowly for the promise of a smile.
How hard it was to leave that city with its buildings wearing
the gray robes of melancholy days remembered,
the musty sweat of damp alleyways and streetlights yellow from old age.
How much the naked trees reminded me of lives I�d never live,
the girl with her cleavage calling like a bad, delicious habit,
a strange love that I know might well be killing me.

Andrei Guruianu
Vestal, New York