The Letter

Unlike the student who can explain why cylinder A is passive,

While cylinder B is gaseous and reactive –

You can hold Love and Grief up to the light and still

Not know how to extract one from the other –

Omit cause and effect because life is rhetorical  –

In one moment, you are seduced like the trees in a sun-choked grove –

Up to your throat in warmth and punchy under the spell

Of an untranslatable Exaggeration, which makes the world

Read aloud like a tender erotic, tragicomic letter addressed to you –

What will you write back, in correspondence with this place?

For that is all it is, your being here in feeling and in thought –

Observe the saplings, vertical in their youth, binding together over time –

Branches snaking around the waists of their leaned on neighbors –

Much like us, in spite of our best feigned efforts to remain unattached –

How you choose to live is one way of writing meaning into the margins –

Where you answer with love and are changed by grief.