The Three

There is this first kind of love first love
when crowns and catapults reel in the air
and the sun explodes in your head and
bursts through your eyes
and your body is a newly bought toy
that you carry with you like a baby blanket
and food, cars, doorways, books, and spoons
look different, not like themselves but objects
all objects shining and shimmering like
the sun on the Monongahela on a really nice day.
The first follows the girl to the changing room
after swimming then locks the door behind him
with a click that echos down decades of time
then knots are yanked apart and virgin breasts
burst free and they are drunk with it.

There is this second kind of love the next love
when you already know what your body can do
and it feels like a frozen Milky Way just turning liquid
in your mouth and there is this smell of new books and old
and nobody cares if there's dirt in the corners and the
stove is encrusted with grease
because it's your home now
you are living in this place with your next love.
The newness, the freedom of playing Monopoly all
day when you should be doing other things
going to the laundromat on a warm night reading
Herman Hesse aloud to each other while the jeans
and shirts and towels thump in the dryer.


There is this third kind of love, the final love
based on solid rock yet moveable in the rain
a love who knows things about you because
you know the same things about him and
paradise is food and food is paradise, there is eggplant and pasta
and ripe tomatoes cut and soaked in olive oil, stuffed
with garlic and you dip your bread into this mix
and it all goes down into your soul so sweet.
Your body marries the third love's body
making a third body invisible, frail and real
a body you can never see, a body with needs
to be fed and sacrifices and spaces you must make
with no promise of reward but there is reward
and you sit together at night and drink coffee
in the morning.
The final love shares animals, wood, stars,
and sky, sits on the front porch reading an
impossibly long many volumed story of World War II
written by Churchill
and this love will remember every word he's read.
He plants his gardens with the same passion and tenderness
with which he loves you and he can hear the great horned owl
at night.