The Architecture of a Love Poem

Love's balustrade, love's balcony

a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still

in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects,

an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather

these rusty words, these rusting gates

before a breath, Standing in the cold morning

on a cold blue stairs, with a curlicue of coffee

you look at the word Love written on the

side of the Pharmacy in cherry-vanilla flavored cursive

because this is where a love poem once stood,

what I am saying right now is secretly built over

a love poem, the fossils of a cupola,

pink buildings with red hyphens and dashes

and three red dots, You, second person pink

with shutters you could open with a fingernail

like in an advent calendar to see sticker scenes

of apartments inside: a radiator, a bare arm,

two cups by themselves on a table

The mind of the attic still persists up there

meditative water

and the chairs talking quietly to one another

It's now pink rubble, rhyming bricks, and an illicit balcony

the heart had such a fancy elevator

that it started to look like a bird cage

and once in a lemon-scented fog

near springtime-fresh trees, I heard two people say,

"Yellow kiss-shaped flowers, telephone flowers,

are falling from my mouth now"

Now, it's a set of blue and white checkered apartment buildings

math problems that are eight stories high

a long division jutting as pollution into the sky

laundry, cooking spills, gasoline shirts

commas, theories or arguments of boyfriends & girlfriends

boyfriends & boyfriends, girlfriends & girlfriends,

all hanging out of the window that you opened.

Source: Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers (Backwaters Press, 2008)