by JS Gilbert
Only what will serve
her well. What otherwise
she may never see.
Cheese puffs implode
in your mouth. Clean-sheet
day is luxurious.
First principles, simple
machines, Newton’s
First Law.
Planets don’t twinkle. Some
fronds curl when stroked.
I love you.
Every morning we feed the birds.
I once grieved beneath insistent deadlines.
Looming, sharp, pointy expectations brushing
my head. The world holding its breath
between life and death as if I held
the cutters, trembling, over the blue
no red no yellow wire. But what have I
ever so urgently accomplished that couldn’t
have waited one more? Waited for a second
opinion, for Christ’s return, for waffles,
for forests to reclaim the Earth for
my fingers circling the length of your
back as we fall asleep?
As I understand
it, my purpose
is to capture,
in passing, this
construction worker giving
another a long-stemmed
wildflower, freshly plucked,
presented, accepted,
rushingly shoved
into a shirt pocket between
shifts, all draped
in safety-first yellow.
It all happened so quickly.
This bus, this love, this
rumpled weed.
There’s something, I think, a flap
or flange on a plane that lets its
fuel tanks hold hands across the
wingspan of a particularly strenuous
crossing, and I think about that
flap whenever I make you laugh, or
when you order the Chinese take-out,
and I pick it up.
God is love and light
particle and wave
the infinite entanglement
that binds creation with laws
we cannot touch but
are touched by.
We move as we are moved
love collapsed into hands that
once observed serve
either others or ourselves.
