Marred Perfection

For What Binds Us
Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

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Not everything that builds a strong and beautiful relationship is easy. There are shelves of books of poetry praising the light, the lovely and the simple, the eternal honeymoon phase of an unlikely love.

Hirshfield graces love with recognition of its labour, with something greater than an acknowledgement of the powerful links forged of pain and forgiveness, fired by history.

Fluff and fancy, sweetness and new sensuality are all well and good, but the other, the hard-earned connection won and won again -- that is real love, faith tried and tested and proven, in the long run, to endure. It has scars and bumps flaws -- is a human thing -- and it has glory beyond measure precisely because of those old, tenderly healed wounds.