Love Poem

Listen to Connie Voisine reading this poem.


Although the angels of numbers and letters
wrestle darkness into shapes, and the plane
descending over the I-10 wraps

my car in the gust and sonic draw of velocity—
it too has a flight path and calm passengers and no
fiery end for us—I duck and think so this is it.

Medievals thought hunger lived its own life in the
body, parasitic, our organs entered by it.
Love was like this too, a contagion, the blood-

filled heart unlocked by his face, her voice,
and we suffered from its side effects of hedonism,
forgetting. The geranium on my porch seems to be

a testament to the finite, the stable, in the warp
of its knobby stems and the slip of white
at each petal's seat, 99 cents at Kmart, but lush

hairs blur the edges of leaves and its musk
supercedes—the water I drink standing near it tastes
heavy and spiced. This flower unlocks, hunger-like,

borders (my mouth, my nose, the water) as does the 747.
Overfull, virulent, the plane dissolves the differences
between my arms, the steering wheel, the airport's

sky and fills me with a roaring which medievals
could only see as dangerous. Animals
killed for slaughter spill their hunger, see how they

continue to bite at the earth? They believed this pour
was absorbed by the grasses and trees, geraniums,
air, and see how much and why I lose myself to you.

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