That Moment in the Dance When Your Body Falls

You must answer this two-part question: what is love and how do you know?

Snow falling on hemlocks, a cardinal in the hemlocks.

We grow tender and slow over here: grandmothers indicate this is the way now.

A sudden panic in the community: all winter squashes going bad no matter how they are put up. 

Horse tracks in snow.

In the night - in utter stillness - I extend my tongue and gently trace the outline of the only pussy I know by heart. 

We insist on form which leads to loss which leads to war (by circuitous psychological routes I do not need to make clear to you because you already know them).

Do you know that moment in the dance when your body falls out of the song - when there is no next move, when the rhythm is measured in notes that extend beyond time?

One dream pushes into another, as when the witch led me deep into the earth's belly and in the darkness there I found the seed from which all light is born.

Disarray is not the law, which can alleviate some of the stress around resisting or instigating change.

Holes in the wall made by angry men. 

This is what you want, this is what you get.

For the life of me I cannot say what Denise thought or felt removing that shirt and letting it fall, though I know in those days she liked being in my poems and found my obsession with the divinity of the image amusing. 

Lingering in Ireland, as one does.

Snow lines the limbs of dying hemlocks and for a moment the heart in me stops and a darkness opens of which I am not terrified.

I remember looking at their hoods and nooses in a D.C. museum and wondering not for the last time what the fuck was wrong with me.

Jaded, ended.

He said to me once he wasn't going to lie - that what he was going to do was going to hurt and I was going to take it because he was the one giving it - and it was true.

Roseate light on winter mornings, this perfect love. 

We cried a lot, hid our tears a lot, slept with the wrong people, got lost and kept going, shoeless and empty-handed, and Christ would it be okay I sit with you a while and talk?