On this ordinary day, you sit with me and together
we watch the small wood-pigeon intoxicated in the grass,
and the jungle fowl hunched over like an old thin man
still mad about new life leaping from leaf to leaf.
Softly, you take my hand and point rightward, leftward,
in your way, you whisper about how
love bulges through the earth’s pockets and out of the crow’s squawk
and within the tiniest drops of dew on the tails of the two squirrels
so in love with themselves that their fur begins to glow as if cast in amber;
in your inscrutable way, you touch my head and love me and you love
my special way of sinking and so I sink some more and together we weep
at the particles in the air like Saturn’s diamonds and at the stillness
in the breeze and at the shock of my ten fingers and of every human face
and, all at once,
everything changes
as though a dark cosmic storm
has stopped,
and there it is, untouched, unmoving, unsullied,
Love’s own love.