the name of a faraway city

Why make? I used to wonder. 

Is it something you have to keep on 

making, like beds or dinner, stir it up 

 

or smooth it down? Sex, I understood, 

an easy creaking on the upholstered 

springs of a man you meet in passing. 

 

You have sex, you don't have to make it, 

it makes you—rise and fall and rise again, 

each time, each man, new. But love? 

 

It could be the name of a faraway 

city, end of a tired journey you take 

with some husband, your bodies chugging 

 

their way up the mountain, glimpsing 

the city lights and thinking, If we can 

keep it up, we'll make Love by morning. 

 

I guess it was fun for somebody, 

my grandmother once said. By then I

was safely married and had earned 

 

the right to ask, there in the kitchen 

beside the nodding aunts. Her answer 

made me sad. In her time, love meant making 

 

babies, and if I had borne twelve 

and buried three, I might see my husband 

as a gun shooting off inside me, each bullet 

 

another year gone. But sex wasn't my question. 

Love was the ghost whose shape kept 

shifting. For us, it did not mean babies, 

 

those plump incarnations the minister 

had promised—flesh of our flesh, 

our increase. Without them, and twenty years 

 

gone, what have we to show 

for the planing and hammering, bone 

against bone, chisel and wedge, 

 

the tedious sanding of night 

into morning—when we rise, stretch, 

shake out the years, lean back, 

 

and see what we've made: no ghost, 

it's a house. Sunlight through the window 

glazing our faces, patina of dust 

 

on our arms. At every axis, mortise 

and tenon couple and hold. Doors 

swing heavy on their hinges. 

 

 [Rebecca McClanahan 'Making Love', from The Best American Poetry 1998; John Hollander, ed.]