Intimate Exile Poem by gershon hepner

Taking the lover’s wound again, the cup of emptiness we drain
each time we breakup with a lover, we move to
an exile from the world of intimacy to the rainless plain
where there’s an “I” that’s aching for the touch of “you, ”
the lover whom had filled our cup with love, the spirit that made us
intoxicated by our intimate delusion.
Not loved by any “you” or loved by them, we don’t want to discuss
our emptiness. Discussing it leads to confusion,
and fills the cup of emptiness with feelings that we tend to find
resembles wine without a body that’s matured.
Few lovers who feel lost without their “you” can ever be resigned
to emptiness since it by new love can be cured.

Inspired by a poem a poem about the Hebridean isle Luing written by Don Paterson. It inspired Jeff Gordinier to visit the isle, and write an article for the NYT Sunday Magazine,10/9/11, and greatly moved Linda.

Luing
A Poem by Don Paterson
When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,
I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.
Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever — sharing her breath,
watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?
Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,
aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.