Love Poems

I
And the sun is everywhere
And the air is filled with pollen
And all the bees weighed down with light
Are golden where the leaves have fallen.

The sidewalk soft with petals.
The air is wet with blossom;
It was frankly hard to comprehend
How all your youth and grace, so lissome,

So supple, could gather in the one body.
The light comes through your hair
As if your hair were light and nothing but:
You shake it to set fire to the air.

II
Love is when green turns to silver
In the last light of day.
We barely knew each other then, and yet
The frogs croaked that hypnotic lullabye

Until all noise was thunder, and the storm
Burst, and the wind lashed the jungle.
Had we released a thousand birds
No greater good fortune than this single

Evening could come. Next night, bang!—
Beneath a crescent moon shines Venus
On the horizon. After which clearly the very idea
Of fortune can hardly contain us.

III
Behold the bird of paradise, compendium
Of light, beholding us. In each direction wingspan 
Leads to the ends of all things
On the edge of the air, where the green

Feathers flutter through the mountain pass.
Compendium of colours is the bird.
We reach the summit; its beak flashes;
The road is steep; I change down hard

To second. The mountain drowns in forest. 
Behold the bird then, circling above us
On the convection of its own imagination, thinking
Only Devour. We say only But how will you love us?

IV
Behold that bird of paradise, aglow
With its own desire to be here,
Ravenous against an anorexic sky.
The world contracts down to an aircon rental car

On the Feast of the Blade of Beholding.
The day pulses hard on the windows, the bonnet,
And we might float away from the tenuous earth
Were not we so gloriously on it.

And only the bird is the witness,
Its long tail trailing colours through the air.
And we are so hungry we are speechless
And you say 'stop we will hold each other here.'

V
Stop we will hold each other here,
For life is fast and the mountains are they burning?
Switch off the engine. At dusk in the silence
The untouchable grace. There is no yearning

If we hold each other.
If the metal still ticks in the engine
It is not our concern
As the pink evening darkens to crimson.

For fortune smiles upon lovers
Even as all the clocks go crazy.
Stop and you will clasp my neck, and I will lean
Into your breath, and oh how the darkness is easy.