The Other Arrows of Eros

1.

A woman can fall in love twenty times a day.
Beautiful things, of course, not so much
Cats as their velvety kittens,
Delicate leaves in winter,
Everything that glistens, even the tracks of snails,
Fossils of imprinted fern once
Green–green wherever,
However lit,
Is longing in a color–
Jelly’s strangely sensuous wobble,
Kindling curled into sparks, clean
Linens filled with a lake of wind,
Movement in trees that is
Nearly conscious,
Opal’s iridescence, and the surprising
Purple of eggplant peeking so
Quaintly among the herbs
Ruffled by a light rain,
Smooth skin of a forearm
Tattooed and itching
To be touched–anyone
Undressed is laughable enough to love,
Volumes and volumes,
When someone whistles unconsciously, or writing
X–two lines
Yoked together with ink,
Zest of anything citrus.

2.

Zealous women love a good list,
Yearn to chronicle all–like
X’s carved in bark to mark a path.
Why this need to catalogue,
Valuing the small, even
Unmemorable details?
To teach ourselves to hear–a conch
Shell pressed to the ear? To see a thread
Running through our odd,
Quixotic lives? To become
Playful as children again, we
Order sounds and make a world from wind.
Notice the potency of this
Mesmerizing balm when you
Lie waiting: place pleasures together like
Kin–whether blackberry
Jam or an
Impish kiss, a bee
Hive’s comb, or
God’s brightness, fullness
Filling each small seed.
Eros can lavish us with more than
Easy infatuation. Look–what
Desire is born of the bright
Constellations and dirt-wrought
Blooms that make life
Bearable, and sometimes–
Astonishing.

Originally published in Slant.

“The Other Arrows of Eros” is an abecedary, where each line begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Here, also reversed.