Love Is a Stone That Won’t Sink
So Long, Oblivion
Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time. Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam. Like the earth sometimes in love with turning away from all light though never really leaving. Like a beach I have wanted to spend years softening though not always wanting the footprints which to ghost crabs are craters. Like a paleontologist resisting always the impulse to ransack my skeletons for drumsticks, though here is the gong, here is the timpani like a bird bath full of absinthe before me. So so long oblivion with your small dreams of silence. I am going to the bank of myself with my pockets hanging out like two ruined countries, like two broken and gorgeous wings.
Carrying Stones
On the grassy slope leading up to the overpass, someone has spelled out LOVE in large, round stones, which is to say sometimes love is a gray and heavy work. My exit lets off at a cemetery. There too the trees are coming back into their leaves like bodies returning to themselves after long illness. I remember once catching a glimpse there of a funeral—twelve suits and dresses, two black-clad children chasing each other and laughing through graves, which is what I want my love's work to resemble. So why end in a graveyard? For those I love I will bake strawberry rhubarb pies, muddle basil in gin and lime, cook pot roast and gumbo and stay up after dark cleaning the kitchen so tomorrow begins pristine. This life is little more than castaway stones but I can carry stones. Where should we put them, what should we build?