Love Is a Stone That Won’t Sink

So Long, Oblivion

Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time.
Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon 
on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar 
I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam.
Like the earth sometimes in love with turning away from all light 
though never really leaving. Like a beach I have wanted 
to spend years softening though not always wanting the footprints 
which to ghost crabs are craters. Like a paleontologist 
resisting always the impulse to ransack my skeletons  
for drumsticks, though here is the gong, here is the timpani 
like a bird bath full of absinthe before me. So so long 
oblivion with your small dreams of silence. I am going 
to the bank of myself with my pockets hanging out 
like two ruined countries, like two broken and gorgeous wings.

Carrying Stones

On the grassy slope leading up to the overpass, someone 
has spelled out LOVE in large, round stones, which is to say sometimes 
love is a gray and heavy work. My exit lets off 
at a cemetery. There too the trees are coming back 
into their leaves like bodies returning to themselves 
after long illness. I remember once catching a glimpse there
of a funeral—twelve suits and dresses, two black-clad children 
chasing each other and laughing through graves, which is what I want 
my love's work to resemble. So why end in a graveyard?
For those I love I will bake strawberry rhubarb pies,
muddle basil in gin and lime, cook pot roast and gumbo
and stay up after dark cleaning the kitchen so tomorrow
begins pristine. This life is little more than castaway stones
but I can carry stones. Where should we put them, what should we build?

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