A woman I love, the one who scrawls verse
with lapidary eyes the color of pale cucumber,
is somewhere in Paris celebrating an engagement

Oh, but I merely kid: for I am promiscuous,
far too full of love for such ridiculous stanzas,
a world awash in the sherbet minutes
before dusk, when such cads as me linger
longingly, with our words and our eyes
and mostly our hearts.

There is far too much world
for just one poem, or even a book of them
or a lifetime of books, churned out with devotions,
loving dedications. Ah, but she tells me,
another woman who has ensnared my mind,
it is the little things. It is about the adjective
finding its noun

(yes, because God saw fit
to create such numinous currents
that lull human creations into harmonious
little constructs, buried amidst our denser
erections: meaning, narrative

And here is me moving blindly, failingly,
towards some perfection, burning ephemeral,
ready to escape your line of sight
and close shut to the world:

The air’s incalescence greets me,
still cold but also firm, the horizon
slick with the sheen of oil, and dew on the grass,
the quilt of ineffable stars gone blind
to my candent heart, the chatoyant morning

The far reaches of man moving through me
and out, into the new day, ready to fall,
full of language, all created for a breath
in a world where what is real
always eludes our greedy hands,
mine especially, playing in the sandy past
while you walk quiet by the Seine,
full of need but not for words. I turn a page

and we are eating donuts in the brackish wind,
tasting something other than sugar
though there is not a word for it, or for anything,
at dawn, the littlest of revolutions. This
morning, this poem, all this love, merely finite