needs urgency to be felt at all,

at which point I left the hall, hurrying

home to cook us dinner and change the sheets,

to sit a moment and rest

before you came back home to me, thinking

all the time of the gods in our stories who, even

with eternity to spare, loved,

which brought them into the human

realms of war and murder, the chaining

of lesser beings in pits of flame, the skinning

of rivals, and the creation of children

sometimes beautiful, sometimes monstrous:

the need for the shapes and skins of animals

to disguise their desires, meaning

the gods knew guilt too, and shame,

and jealousy; they knew, as we tell ourselves, about all

the human emotions in which love

is rooted: self-love and love

for spouses, daughters, sons, other

people’s wives; the love for ex-

lovers too, those secret

old needs flamed out but the ashes nursed

out of respect for the failure. The gods loved

because we wanted them to be like us: no,

it is not an excess of time

that would keep them from feeling it: love

embroiders time—moving in and out of what

we imagine of it or what, if we were gods,

we could finally know.

For them, death is the thing

that is expendable; eternity means only

that suffering can be withstood

because it may be forgotten, because we are the ones

who must exist in the quick

sharpening and dulling of whatever wounds

assert us as human.

If we are different from the gods,

it is because we are more afraid, our sweet,

dim ordinary pleasures necessary

to assuage what can’t be forgotten, an instinct

where theirs is an indulgence, and so our love

is deeper, more frightening, more terrible

than theirs. The gods loved, but they loved only

as like us as they could. They could never match it,

they would never match it, and it is because

of all the things they loved,

eternity would teach them to covet most

their power and their will.

We have these things too, in abundance.

But not time. For love

needs no time at all.

The History of Paisley

THE HISTORY OF PAISLEY

For Shahid, who wrote this poem first: how Parvati’s

footsteps rained down Zabarvan’s slopes

as the goddess fled from Shiva, so enraged

her heel marks scorched teardrops

through Kashmir’s valleys until paisleys

burned through every mountain glade—

Who believed that beauty outstrips

history, its violence woven through art’s fragile threads

until the Scottish town that made these footsteps

famous vanished into myth, colonial shawls paid

for with blood, its guild of weavers, brawlers, poets

turned riot, shawls unraveled then lost,

the tall looms burning to a lacework of smoke—

Had he known that Europe’s last

recorded witch was hung here, where once I dozed

in a Glasgow theater, startling awake

when a travel advert shrilled my name?