I do not understand Pordon when she says
your love makes her “tremble with me
in paralyzing pauses,” nor do I understand
Cummings when the texture of your fragility “compels me
with the colour of its countries.”


Too often poets confuse some high,
a drug-induced elation, with a testament
of love. But it is not some contrived intoxication
that makes me see your beauty as divine
or your voice as some thrill to be craved.


Your touch does not electrify my skin or send me
into the light-headed ecstasy of a common drunk.
But the simple warmth of your center, the smooth suppleness
of each padded fingertip does elicit euphoria in me because it is you,
my earthly lover, who possesses them, and in so possesses me.


Your kiss does not make time speed
through the highways of my mind like
an amphetamine, blurring physics into philosophy.
Rather, your mouth points out the geometric precision
of time compared to the fluidity in
the organic bow of your bottom lip.


I am not addicted to your glances like some aesthetic ******,
because your gaze does not make my heart race
like the hummingbird pace of someone needing a hit
of your rainbow-prismed eye. Instead, it is the complex brown,
turned honey in the sunlight, that stills my heart
whenever you turn from me, because it is that familiar liquid tint
that I love more than any other.


And the sight of you does not commit me to profound
epiphanies on politics or sociology, because, I admit,
you are my favorite distraction, and I prefer looking at you
to some wild hallucination, since I am struck momentarily dumb
by the weighty power of your sudden presence,
left in myopic gratitude until you leave again.


So understand, dear reader, that it was not some chemical
fixation that bound Petrarch to Laura or Dante to Beatrice,
but rather the arresting truth that the million colors poured out
by the sun, the duck fluff softness of the rowdy dogs at your feet,
and the explosive, joyous giggles of the neighborhood children
will continue to exist in heart-breaking beauty tomorrow.