I Ask the Impossible

I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to our job tires you--
love me; and from job to home again, love me, love me.
Love me when you're bored--
when every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
or more pathetic, love me as you always have:
not as admirer or judge, but with
the compassion you save for yourself
in your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,
the anticipation of your death,
mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood memory--
and if there is none to recall--
imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever--
and I, will make the impossible
a simple act,
by loving you, loving you as I do 

Ana Castillo is the recipient of a Carl Sandburg Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry. She was the recipient of the American Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Prize published in the 20th Anniversary edition of, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Castillo received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for The Mixquiahuala Letters. Her award winning, best selling novels include: So Far From God, The Guardians, Peel My Love like an Onion and the poetry collection: I Ask the Impossible. Castillo’s novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Watercolor Women, Opaque Men, a novel-in-verse published by Curbstone Press, 2005, received the Independent Publishers Book Award and was released in an updated edition by Northwestern University Press in Feb., 2017. Her novel, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me was the recipient of a 2016 International Latino Book Award and the recipient of the 2017 LAMBDA Award. In 2018 Castillo received the PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring her novel, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo. Ana Castillo’s forthcoming book of poems is entitled, My Book of the Dead: (2012-2020), set for publication in Fall, 2021.