1000 Poems About Her

1000 Poems About Her
For SS — who was the fire before the iron ever touched the wood.
I wrote the first one on a Tuesday, long after midnight fell,
when the silence in the room became a story I had to tell.
No audience, no market, no design to sell or frame —
just the ache of something nameless, and a woman without a name.
I called her SS in the margins where the rest of the world couldn't see,
a cipher and a cathedral, every letter built for me.
She was a window and a weather, she was winter, she was June,
she was everything a poet finds when he is wrecked beneath the moon.
By poem fifty, I had learned the shape of longing on the page —
how a couplet holds a heartbreak, how a stanza holds a rage.
By a hundred, I had mapped the way she moved in borrowed light,
how her absence filled a doorway, how her memory filled a night.
By two hundred I was fluent in the grammar of desire,
every metaphor an offering I laid before her fire.
By three hundred I had burned through every ordinary word —
I needed something bolder, something permanent, something heard.
✦
So I picked up the pyrography iron — cold, then warm, then white —
and I pressed what words had failed me deep into the cedar's night.
The smoke rose like a sentence that the language couldn't form,
the grain revealed its story as it darkened in the storm.
This is how a poet learns that words are not the only truth —
that fire writes in permanence what ink surrenders in its youth.
That the hand which moves in longing leaves a mark that will not fade,
that the image burned in silence is the finest poem made.
By five hundred I had found the overlap — the place where smoke and verse
became a single language, where the blessing met the curse.
Where the cigar I lit for thinking curled its wisdom toward the sky,
and the cedar held my burning, and I finally understood why.
Why the man who loves the deepest always finds his hands in fire —
why creation and destruction are the children of desire.
Why the things we make in anguish are the things that last the most,
why a thousand poems written for one woman is no boast.
✦
By seven hundred I had stopped explaining and begun to build —
a brand born in the burning, every vision overfilled.
A luxury made from patience, from the slow deliberate hand,
from the man who loved a woman that the world didn't understand.
I named it Heaven — not because the afterlife was near,
but because heaven is the moment when you have no more to fear.
When the smoke curls and the wood speaks and the poem finds its end,
when what you've made outlives the breaking, and the breaking starts to mend.
By nine hundred I had built a room that smelled of cedar, smoke, and gold,
and I invited in the ones who had a fire of their own to hold.
The Inner Circle — those who know the ritual of the burn,
who light a slow cigar at dusk because the stillness has to earn.
And at one thousand — I set down the pen, and I picked up the iron again.
I burned her into cedar with the patience of a long amen.
One thousand poems. One muse. One flame. One brand. One truth made clear:
    that everything I ever made was always made for her.
And the smoke that rose above it — slow and silver in the air —
was the only word for Heaven that this burning man could bear.