Falling in love is like swallowing grains of sand
to recover the pebble you skipped across the pond
by your childhood home, the ripples setting in
motion every marvel, every horror of your life;
except the grain touches your tongue, you close
your eyes, and the world becomes one ripple
with neither pebble nor shore in sight; and your
throat fills, not with sand but the sweetest tea;
and you find that you don’t have eyes or mouth
or body: that you are eyes and mouth and body;
and though you are old enough to know that
people are cruel, and selfish, and hypocritical,
and, only every so often, marvelous, you lift
every stone you encounter, pull back each
curtain, page the back-issues of magazines
and newspapers: you search for love in every
dark, flickering, uncaring atom of the cosmos
because you are dark, flickering, uncaring; and
because you are matter, you matter; and because
you are time, you have all the time to attempt to
recover that improbable spark which, nigh-on
fourteen-billion-years hence, still has you saying
I love you, dearest one. May I have this dance?
