Dark Pairing

I am learning to love you,

                        my fingers unruly.

What thrives without
                                                                 special treatment? 

Not all species are hardy,
            easy to grow from seed.  Let us 

remember how innocent we were.

Some species
                                                            prefer full sun, others tolerate
the shade— 
Love, didn’t I know you first

by your body’s particulate sweat?—Some

species are overlooked, mistaken
                                                for weeds, choked by the neighboring,

and there was a time I was one
                        of many thin stalks none would want to cut.
      
You move among the many-
                                                breasted hives, my heart under your foot,

sister of a stone. It’s true I gave

you the memory of my sister to keep, seed
                                                of her ghost—        

and you, here like this,
                                    pressing back—it comes
        
            back readily, and I turn

to you, caught,
            your mouth opening.  I feared

my father most, and fought his voice’s                  

                        hard darkening—toughest of all species,
           
it survives on its own, and though the propensity to hybridize creates confusion,

                                                            you and I continue to bend into and away

from each other, dark pairing.  I understand

the fear
of a child growing 
                                       into a woman, one       

            who might show love—kneeling down
      
            to drink again the riotous tangling of my legs in yours.

                                    Don’t we have to cut away rungs from this
wild climbing? Here
       is grace,

such verdant and frost-
burnt propagating.

 
by Tarfia Faizullah



*Italicized lines are from "The Beekeeper's Daughter" by Sylvia Plath

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Tarfia Faizullah is the Pushcart Prize winning author of Seam (SIU, 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear inAmerican Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, jubilat, Oxford American, New England Review, Best New Poets 2013, Poetry Daily, and have been anthologized in Excuse This Poem: 100 Poems for the Next Generation, The Book of Scented Things,  and Poems of Devotion. Honors include scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the Nicholas Delbanco Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program and co-directs the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press with Jamaal May.