Ordinary Light Poems by IOAKIM IOAKIM

Fifty poems about the life inside the life.

Ordinary Light is a collection of long lyric poems about love and its complications — the first love that taught you something you didn't know you'd learned, the long marriage in its third incarnation, the divorce that looked like a Tuesday, the remarriage that required you to carry the first one through the door. About ageing and what the mirror shows and what the body becomes and what the body knows. About grief that runs on its own schedule and ambushes you in supermarkets. About the friend who stayed and the friend who died too young and the father whose hands you are becoming. About forgiveness as a practice, not a decision. About custody and the Tuesday parent and the love that is not divided by the living arrangement.

These are poems about what actually happens.

What Divorce Looks Like on a Tuesday — It looks like dividing the spice rack. It looks like deciding who keeps the good knife. It looks like sleeping in the same bed for six more weeks because the lease. The catastrophe looks like ordinary. The Tuesday after the catastrophe looks like every other Tuesday except the spice rack is half empty and you keep reaching for the paprika that she took.

What I Know About Love at Fifty — It is slower. Not worse. Slower. The way a river slows when it's no longer rushing to prove something. At thirty love was something that happened to you. At fifty love is something you do. Every day you do it. You choose the room she's in. That is the whole of it.

Long Marriage — We have been married long enough to have had three different marriages. The first one was the one we thought we were having. The third one is this one — the one with the full knowledge of each other's capacity for disappointment and the choice to stay anyway.

What Grief Teaches — It teaches you that you can carry more than you thought. Not more than you can bear. More than you thought. Some of it is unbearable. You bear it anyway. That is a different thing.

Sixty — You don't arrive at sixty. You surface into it. The things that matter have clarified. They were always this small list. You spent decades adding to the list and now you are subtracting and what's left is the actual list.

Forgiveness — I did not forgive him all at once. That is not how forgiveness works. Forgiveness is the setting down. Not the letting go. You put the stone on the ground and you walk. Some days you pick it up again. That's fine. The next day you put it back down.

Fifty poems. The ordinary made visible. The hard years and what came after. The love that continues past the loss.