Love Poem for A Garden

So soon map of seed and map of root and map of molecule that is irrevocably changed the moment I notice it, record it, steal its breaking and blooming and make it my own.  This is how I had to unlearn "love."

The lesson:  There will be pathways and rows and cages and knees ground into the dirt with hands that pray a good thing and a hopeful thing and a thing that could die.   I struggle to let you be you because you might change under my fingers.  Do I dare disturb...

And the fingers were:  lonely, calloused, versed in intricate patterns of string and soil.

And the woman at the window is pressing her fingers to the glass that looks out to the garden in the same way the woman in the reflection is pressing the tears to the glass of her eyes and holding them there, captive and panting.  She will define her boundaries as the boundaries simultaneously define her.  Cages and row.  Seeds and sow.

And the poems are asking, "How do you do it?"

Today we read them--love poems again and again and again and came to the same conclusions:

To love is good and demolishing.  And the women are strong at receiving and the men are good at giving and the arms are tested for strength and the tears are tested for truth and the hearts are mapped and broken and held aloft in the green tendrils we planted to tie them together when our love had been cracked and tested and the water was pressed from the glass and eyes and the rain came into the house and held us clean under its weight as the root hummed us to sleep saying, Hush, dry heart, as I steal you and teach you how it was in the beginning.