Love for the Wrong ThingAuthor(s): Michael CarlsonSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall, 2002), p. 107Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20155127 .

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Love for the Wrong Thing

I sit on the part of a tumble of wall that splits this field of twigs from a Rhode Island of moist gray grass, and I think about the papers

we buried in there, receipts for something, say candy cigarettes, electrical tape, a gift of superman band-aids.

We meant, I guess, to dig them out one day,

married and destroyed by our lives

like our fathers,

but tonight, I say those slips are lost, or I say

they were swallowed by seagulls now crossing a harbor. Floating to Wickford,

they are sacred as sea scrolls,

naked as bone now,

though we wrapped them

in the packaging of whatever they proved we bought.

107

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