Love’s Crossing

 

Out on the plains, across the continent,

My thought of you rolls on.

Though I sit here in a broken windowed cave,

The entire world contained within this box,

Now and I then I think of you, and pause.

You come back so fast, fast as the flicker of a moth,

You come back flash and flood.

 

The thought blooms and  flutters up.

And it moves out across the plains,

The murmuring cities,

The dying twilight deserts,

Sweeping between rows of stucco houses,

Flying high above city herds of traffic,

Fluttering away from uninspired poets reaching up to snatch it.

And it tunnels through a net of cell phone calls,

And though a million wires cross its course,

It moves out sure as time, sure as a pigeon seeks its nest,

Sure as Arjuna’s arrow finds its mark.

 

And I like to think that you receive it.

Like a letter slipped under your doorway

in the early morning light.

While you are going for your daily run,

Or while you ride a crowded city bus, and some straying

wisp of thought

Takes you back to someone perhaps you had forgot,

Back to days that now seem childish, too simple,

though they had a certain charm.

Perhaps it makes you pause, and fix your eyes

back towards the West,

Before you turn back to some more tangible,

more pleasant face.

 

I do not mind.

It has made me close my eyes a little harder to engrave your face

Down into a nook where it will linger,

Like a dead coal that becomes a cinder,

that I can turn to when my eyes are tired

Of looking at this screen.

It has made me wonder whether one moment is enough.

It has made me sit and hammer,

Sculpting gold leaf words

That I can send you through the mail

And be content if they made you smile just once.

It has made me wonder whether one moment is enough.

It has filled my chest wi—

Ah, sweet girl!

Let me put it plainly.

It has made me love you.