Scrabble on the Moon

You, young waif, must have had a love, a lover
which you adamantly deny.
But how else could you write like you do?
You had a lover, are mad, a liar, a genius.
Confess.
I know it. I know it:
You played Scrabble on the moon.
Your lover was perfect: dark, thin,
with long satin lashes and black suicide eyes.
He completed you, no, surpassed you,
surprised you with your own device:
shoved a wooden crate through your chest
so you could feel something.

Only pain this profound
could bring on your swoon.
The problem was (am I correct?)
that you are eminently literate,
but your lover could not spell --
or it seemed so, in the absence of gravity.
The letters kept flying into space,
so how, really, to know?

Oh, the words were spectacular:
yours, and your word-twin's,
you aching, laureate logophiles,
looking down on Earth
with equivalent disdain,
as it always bored you with
its tiresome blue and green.

Beautiful words: ululate, viscera, juniper,
quaver, sartorial, isothermal, plantain,
all stunners, fifty points, a hundred, more.
The competition was killing, which
which engendered more love.
Your lips locked with words.
You couldn't let go.
Anyway, it was hard to see
in the weak light of sleepy suns.

But the words, the letters, floated,
conjugating space, germinating
permutations: six, seven,
ten syllables, more --
words giant as Jupiter
with his diligent vigilant eye,
as inflamed, as passionate as Venus,
as lovely as Saturn swirling
in her diaphanous petticoat prism.

The words spelled the sky.
In time, they spelled, literally, sky,
a mere ten points draped in dark.
But oh, my darling young one,
that's just what love does.
It's how love goes.
And your inner genius knows.

Copyright Julie K. Shavin 2009