Another
Love does not come in stacks of flat words but
drains like dirty oil into a single hush of being.
Love does not guarantee happiness,
only the hard choice to grow or die.
Love is a seedling whose flesh
crawls deep into our earth
to show us how to break
from the surface of our seeds.
Love has twin souls—not just the one
who utters candied incantations,
who conducts great symphonies,
who cuts long carrots into sticks, but also
the one who recalculates directions
after mistakes are made and who
scrubs incontinent floors and
sways with us in contaminated silence.
Love is not alone in the forest, is not a
pool of sunlight that bathes a cold sterile room,
is not a metal cadre of earth moving machines.
Love is not a harvest, but the field that waits
as we fall out of ourselves, finally parted
from our hard outer shells.
5-8-11, Mother’s Day
