Michael Mesic
Love's Cross-Currents
1
Quick but unchanging in its restlessness,
The sea confects a briny wave on wave;
Whether to rise above a frightened head
Or rock it slowly in slack lullaby
Is but a matter of scale and innocence —
The sea feels no compulsion in its ebb
And flow, neither wills itself nor understands
The motive of its other-worldly love.
2
But earth’s love is self-love, dancing gravity.
Fishes with cloudy, uninflected eyes
Wander the speckled scenery of the deep.
Caverns of buildings, glassy, sleek and steep.
Though covered with the excretions of excess,
How various is the record, ages-worth —
Small scratches, broken vessels, buildings, bones?
Yet they have made no lasting monument.
3
We love the stars not as we love the sun.
Let them claim a constellation finds us
Out, with its dense pattern of light, abstract
And coldly distant, in our murky way.
We love our shadows as we love the sun;
The inextricable bright and dark which binds us
Flatly to that final ground of fact,
Even the birds who spend their age in air.
Page(s) 24
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