Lasting but minutes:
Joy, joy, joy, Bliss.

            Really, not always:
Often much less.

            Attaching to walls:
Life quickened, or

             Unborn, aborted,
Birth unfulfilled.

            De-gifted spirit,
Born to heaven.
 
Some blessed, carried to term with affection: released
With conflicted pain
To others’ arms.

            In communal love,
Communed in woe.

New bosom entreating life, gifted: mother, child
            Reclaiming lost hope,
Circle rounded.

            The next, touched by God,
Gives all but birth. 
 
Sacrifice and gain commingle in the prophet
            Whose gratitude
Bi-directions:

            And gave of her womb
Toward destiny.
 
To the mother who claimed him as hers and loved him,
            And gave of her heart
                        Unrestrictedly,
           
            And gives of her heart
                        To the world:
                                    Her love:
                                                Her son:
                        Unrestrictedly.

          Heir by assassin’s blades,
Victor over Egyptian war temptress,
          Victor over her bedeviled lover,
Reigning over new Rome, over Christ’s birth.

At his feet we linger, Emperor,
          Shaking his leg like the
Trunk of a majestic oak, gazing up,
          Rustling and jostling just-purpling leaves,
Awaiting paper-thin, breezy fall rain.

          Toward loosely gathered piles—
Apologies, remorse, half-lived lessons—
          Away from slouch-massed, bloodied Julius,
Away from gilded, laurel-girded youth.

          Wholly neither, scaling
Onward, lightly bathed in misty humid
          Remembrances after pink, pre-sunset
Thundershowers give way to golden dusk.

          On still damp, sodded fields,
And dew points dropping, cicadas buzzing,
          Geese gathering, threatening planned south-flight,
Diesel buses grind gears up hills toward schools.

Scraping back and forward, maybe two
          Generations each way,
For a minute, as playmates from our spring
          Lean too hard-shouldered into their own trunks:
Green-leaved yet, vernal ghosts left, early-dimmed.       

Clinging still to Caesar’s fatted calf,
          Our parents stand knee-deep
In piles beneath their own oaks, having shook
          Their own same trees not very long ago:
Each autumnal birth, a spring conception.

There are but two souls that matter on twirling Earth
            and the heavens and in between and beyond,
Swirling together in a perfect emulsion,
            and electrifying sweet, sentimental tangency:
 
Your overflowing, ebullient, joyous essence
            and my fulfilled, arrhythmic soul in your presence,
Beating together, hearts in perfected cadence,
            and sharing a single spiritual DNA.

There are but two undiluted truths that matter
            and from which all knowledge and wisdom commence,
Asserting without high-browed equivocation
            and informing our village of two among some billions:

            and that you love me, unrestricted, in return,
Accepting my imperfections, flaws and failures
            and loving me–in pure perfection–despite them.

 Where?
There are but two places alone that will matter
            and around which all compasses calibrate,
Pointing into the vast, blue, and empty cosmos
            and settled with mitochondrial specificity:
 
The first place where, singularly, you are with me,
            and the second,  where I–desolate–am away,
The one where joy erupts from every molecule,
            and one where I must long for proximity.

 When?
There are but two moments in time-space that matter,
            and from which all moments from moments expand
Forward into the endlessly eternal past
            and back to the origins of unwrinkled time undone:
 
The endless, calm moment before your shy “hello,”
            and the moment after when I consumed your breath:
The first black moment when I merely existed
            and the white-hot moment of newly quickened me.
 

 Why?
There are but two reasons for breathing and hoping,
            and enduring tedium from beyond us,
Showered upon by blunt Persiod reminders
            and rejoinders against our mythical closed-loopedness:
 
That there are radiant moments we pass together
            and places where our souls and truths are commingled:
Wishes realized amid heaven-strewn meteors.
 
            And then those agonizing moments apart,
            left longing for togetherness,
                        for the other:
                                    for the why.