Love Prodigal

Love Is

a patient, perhaps. As in wearing its gown,
gripping its belly and complaining about
its clumsy health, asking for its histories
to be kissed away. Love is kind of excited
to have a body sometimes, with its delicious
weaknesses—shivers, tiredness, the tastebuds
for macchiatos and Oreos. Love is a spring
storm coming to weep its petty joys all over
the bees in the graveyard. Love is a nest
of moonlight, by which I mean nothing
real but still something beautiful, seductive
as any good image. I feel sad about love
as I rub my own feet in the waiting room,
but maybe tomorrow it will come to boast,
its hope will churn through the cumulus noon,
lightning promising a flood of flames, grass
offering obedience to the fire. If it’s coming,
I can endure it with the patience of the rose
of Jericho. Even with morning’s slow rain
apologizing to the garden, love is a head on
my chest and the deep breath. It’s the museum
of confessions and shared sleeps. It is a body’s
quick amnesia, the pain barely a memory
after a pill. It glows like a hospital gown dipped
in luminol. It waits like the hand in your hand
for something to stir to life and squeeze.