A Love Poem

How do you Just Know,
the way your grandmother said it,
like things were then,
under simpler roofs,
white sheets snapping in the wind
like bones, and you could feel the current
in your own marrow.

You can never think about her words
without a cloud,
an intellectual frowning through his pince-nez
at the sheer naivety of the Just:
What about the hundred questions?
The interviewing?
The scientific method of
dissection, probing,
peeling-back-of-the-skin
to see the slick insides,
to check the heart,
confirm its chambers,
its steady liquid thump
reassuring and rhythmic.

Yet even after this,
you look into a face,
a subject you’ve measured carefully,
observed and recorded all gestures,
and think:          Question Mark.
See features and not the face.
Can’t recall it from memory of even an hour,

and think your grandma must have been lucky,
some fortunate combination
of eye contact, ovulation,
and the wind just right to waft her scent to him,
to make him stammer.

You accept.
Some are blessed with knowledge,
some with faith, the reward the same, and so on,
you live. You try and err
and try.

And one day you learn
that you were thinking of it all wrong.

It wasn’t the first spark,
the angle of the sun or Venus,
the hair across her face.

It comes slowly,
grows into you,
wide as banana leaves,
pushing out all the shadows
so there is only room for incandescence,
for gravity holding you still
inside, anchored,
and you forget to ask the questions
you always had. They are gone
with syntax and scalpels, with parenthesis.

And when someone asks you
what you always wondered yourself
you smile,
still no better at words
than a woman with worn hands.

There is no secret, you want to say,
no trick. Just
inside you
the silent horizon
expanding against the sky.