My love for you is like a porch in summer, half lit in the fading sun, cicadas hanging heavy from the trees, each bough buzzing with warm electric static.  Moving in and out of harmony, they attend to all the ways my mother understands, all the ways I am satisfied with the wisdom of my father, and all the ways words become unnecessary on a night like this.

This night: my baseball glove sits on the porch floor, ball tucked inside.  I tune the radio to listen to the sounds of the city. The announcers voice comes through introducing lineups, pitchers, sponsors; his voice sounds like forgiveness, like the redemption of a day's misguided energy. In the background I hear the crowd finding their seats, conversing, smelling hot dogs and pizza, it buzzes through the speakers. Sensations strong and pulsing, like the roar of a passing motorcycle, like the smell of the earth after winter, like the beat of my heart; I pick up my glove.

This night life becomes simple, finds all its complexity expressed in the strain of muscles, the sound of a ball hitting leather, the image of crisp green grass, of a lit up stadium against the darkened city, of which I am a part. Though that remains unsensed, trains howling like wolves through ***** streets and all.

This may be the closest I come to love, what I will see when I look at you, what dreams will unwind when I brush my wrists against yours.

Part I

The fragile, forgotten arctic perseveres; the white snowy tundra wrapped in a blanket of darkness.

The buried threads of memory under hardened, ice plastered arctic waters.
Why always to be submerged? Can you feel the freezing?
As if only icebergs can gather the brine of the ocean to itself and never let go.

What does not return fungal and muddy in more corporeal climes travels toward the poles.
Is there an alternative to ice bound quiescence?
As if what has passed to the extremities of mind is not forever lost.

And so I follow the leads, swimming in the cracks of what forgetting has not claimed.
Will even these channels soon freeze over?
As life travels northward intent on testing the conditions of existence.

Part II

Under an icy sheet of polar sky; fissures of light weeping through an immovable, immeasurable surface.

The strongest force in the universe embeds the foundation of our undulating, fractured lives.
Does that which holds us together also keep us apart?
As light is held in tension between being and becoming, revealing and altering.

Our wavering hearts like solitary planets seek orbit around a suitable center.
Do we choose the star which gives light to our days?
As our gravity reels, heedlessly casting for moons or meteors in passage.

And so the hushed wall spreads a river of blazing reds and somber greens.
Do the gaps in our comprehension expand imagination or despair?
As memory embeds each frozen expanse, touching where the horizon unfolds.