“Love”
Notice how water passes through your body, creating
conditions for irreversible change.

Hear it, the current pulling at your breath: love
Hear it, light caught in a diamond: love

Hear it in the shortness of a lung yearning
for the everlasting — love. It inhales, too:

a spectrum of color oxygenating
the blood in the veins of your hands

as you slice a sweet potato, peel
rosemary and place it

in an oven. In the garden, love is bare
as a root, exposed

from wet mud, draped
in moss. It slips

through the world’s porous openings
into the churning — worm seeking worm, alive

amongst minerals and the strange seed
of ten thousand leaves, ten million cytoplasms —

each molecular world opening like a window
in a hot room. Air moves against the body,

jeweled in sweat, earth and fire hidden
in its bones. Under the slow waterfall

of living flesh
voice

in the throat of a stem, water-green
as the dilated eye of a lover — desperate

as thunder —
the world above clearing into a stethoscope of stars,

millennia-old light squeezing
through dark matter’s black teeth,

its brightness sung into an eye that can almost bear
this moment of beauty.

Ah, to be held by this gaze. To be known
like the dark knows itself, by the strange ways

it is changed by light: ocean of nothing, pool
of luminous shadow, wound

where love can enter, glide
to the heart and live

in its rhythms —
the ancient sound, the first dark, blood

and its quickening