Poem’s Poem of Love

Not saying the word reliably, historically
like weather or the knots
in thinking around
emotional language, tangled
in this bright mid-day moment (of reading)
and the medium
and a pronoun . . .

And “you” is never easy—
a striated sign of things
to come and counter
to the sense of sentence, its ease
and assurance—so the word
“with” becomes still uneasier and
I walk into the sunlit room,
poem in hand, a proximity,
molecular and climatic,
twined and tugging tight
half listening to the news
of storms forming
over the warming oceans . . .

A deligitimized ground, standing
there, as if through a semblance
of scientific instrumentation, who
is who’s target is the question and
the water line wavers in the
refracted calculations--you look up your altitude
in an archaic book of symbols,
you look up and tell me we need
to flee . . .

Love is resistant to anti-
biotics, bodies react to themselves
and become something else; later
we hear 21st century love retreated from the coasts,
subsided in the mountains, subsisted
on salmon and berries . . .

We read “red” in the remaining
records, and “faith”—but these
codes fail, these letters fall still, cars by the side
of the highway house
sparrows and squirrels,
a reorganized polis . . .

And I’d like to think
of us, by the side of the derelict
highway, bereft and happy,
a fistful of yarrow and a wooden cup of tea
but the future tense may
not be, love’s love sprung
from the old language, from
the subject’s regime . . .