Warning: Poem Post

Delta
A careful plan, a flawless thought,
all executed to the letter,
or was it merely a stroke of luck
that made it something better?

we cling like bats to our forms and unforms
and leap from them at will to sound the night
looking for new love, for ways to write it
without the words

heart
love
I
you

our stomachs churn at the overdone simply
for its chew, a rare steak ruined, a corked
wine run sour and poured for the masses
we search for love in viscera, to write it

with the ink of bodies or to pull from it
some essential universality, an alchemy of
mundane experience become shard divinity
the purest love

the purest love in poetry is not found in
words or couplets, not rhyme or meter
attempting a heartbeat
we fail because we do not write for love

and we do not write in love; we lose
because our poetry is the object of
the wrong proposition—we write
of love

I delighted in a question: why did the road
bend there? And my love, who posed
the question, who wondered at the curving
highrise nesting on a delta between boulevards

caught my answer in a butterfly net of end-
rhymed quatrains and pinned it to a page,
giving me a love poem that spoke nothing of love,
but in it, sang it in the delta between lines

my love found the universal in a poem of
question marks and urban planning,
a butterfly garden for the bat poet hungry
no more for words of love