Poem

Love

is hardly a matter of fact;
is it a question
or an answer
to the new sun in your eyes
as you lay in scrunched crabgrass
and scattered small rocks
tearing the skin of your back
as she whispers again,
'pair of balls’ or ‘parable.’
You can’t tell which and either way
you would miss the point.

Morning Blue Jays sing and Red-belled
Woodpeckers beat song:
when things might be different
love makes them the same:
clouds, cobblestones, curators of dreams;
when things might be reasoned
love makes them absurd:
mountains, moments, measures of desire;
when things might be lost
love rescues the ends:
pulp, pleasure, painstaking belonging;
when things might be deemed
love at long last:
breathe, breathe, breathe.

The solitude of the clear sky,
the moment
regards your existence
like a trace of ginger, typhoid,
alchemy: we are
what we are
and are not, a question,
an answer.