Every time I
fall in
love,
I think I've never
been in
love before
because
I
haven't

Love is not
one word,
one sense,
overall meaning
or
interpretation:

Love is this-

it's every
individual
and everything
you are.
It's a stirring of
hatchlings who have
discovered their
wings so to
romance every
yearning tree in the
woods
again and again
devotedly
flying into
love because wings are meant to
carry
bodies into the arms
of stars

I thought about him today again
as I was
driving,
the narrow, curving road end-
lessly winding

Four years ago this
Christmas
he died
too young for it to be
ok
if death's ever
ok,

Ok,

he doesn't come into my
mind much
anymore, I
admit

but when he does,
it's drilling

it's piercing.

it's a hammer to a nail
incessantly
pounding,
god

when the road is long
when my engine's overheating
when I have spent a morning under
a raging, August sun
painting,

He will always cross my mind because
the sun held him so tightly and then
it wouldn't let him go.

I think that
I was there
when
Venus
danced from
the foam

her ankles
kissing
the sea

like a conch,
put me
to your ear
and you'll
hear the ocean
in me.

I don't care
if you
remember
years from now

how the lacy
kitchen
curtains beat
against the
slivered
sills

or how the oven
spilled its
heavy air
into the house
each
August night

          It's only here
        
                only now

only in this moment
where I'm washing
my dry hands
of cooking
picnic and
rose park
things to
  chew
   with
    our
     w
      o
       r
        d
          s

I'm so effected by
the way the oven
heats me
the way this summer
heats me
the way I can't explain my love, you
heat me

and the thought of
a rose park
engulfs me
in flames.

There's beauty
in containment-
which is only
liberation-
permission to
let go
and
defy
design

I'm a field of
wildflowers
in a
vase
and I couldn't be
more free.

The moon is
sitting
in her *****
bathwater,
going cold,
always in
the cycle of
here and
not

why is it
that with
this beauty
I cannot
be happy?