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Tag: love

This Just In

The moment your wife
first notices the gray
hair winding from your chest
will not be breaking news.
Its coming will have been
foretold by nothing so brash
as a star rising in the east;
rather an inexplicable twinge
or colonoscopy or acute interest
in biographies of the dead.

Even so you will have long
ago negotiated an amicable if
not peaceful telomeric armistice.
Latecomer to the front — major
networks returned to regularly
scheduled programming, cables
wound, corpses buried and cold —
she gestures in earnest sympathy,
‘Here was strength. There was
joy.’

‘I will tell your story.’

Prognosis

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.

Anxiety Is the Thief of Love

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?

Dallas Rd at Niagara St

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.

I’m No Mechanic

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.

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