Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

sometimes love is a black dot

in a field

sometimes, suddenly

it is not

I’m really trying

to be better, to commit

to memory the old songs about the ground,

to better sense your latitudes

I know the difference between imagination and memory no more than this,

than you

Light as Imagined through a Body of Ice

An expansion into light, or we could have been, or were

for a moment.

We would,

without half-trying, alight one upon the other.

A feather is caught in the rapture of a fence,

keeps struggling—can’t come to terms—

cannot unthink that it’s a bird

The dead teach us that kind of patience.

How different the drawings of a people must be

who have always had this kind of time.

if you can imagine the elements of those atoms, of those ants

and rabbits, as not the skin of the observable universe

but the whisper upon which we built a hearth,

you’ll understand.

it’s said we are afraid

of what we don’t understand. who

among us is shaken by latin? we are terrified of what might

overtake us. sadness, marriage, spanish,

rain.

if the silence of the two of us

were predicated by my being able now to reach you,

how that quiet, that night, in this room, might seem a comfort,

but instead of that, the candles

between, and neither of us with anything

in particular to say, the quiet trembles