What we think, when we think of love:
the night out of which young women
are plucked; our own nights of solitude;
loss, interminable, or its possibility, fuel

for the precautions taken; fermentation,
yeast loving sugar, dough rising under
the floured sheet; the sea loving the shore
furiously, wave after percussive wave; whole
colonies of plankton loved by gray whales;

the trees outside this house love autumn so
much they shake with pleasure when it returns;
ice loving water until it dissolves completely,
like flesh into the earth. What they’ll find centuries
hence: the graves, or their outline, the sweet loam

taking its time—the worms having loved,
the expendable love of maggots—eye sockets
are almost eyes, skull, collarbone, lean femur,
prehensile extension of thumb, digits splayed,
the act of love, not a salve, but a solvent.