After Dorianne Laux
I’m in love with you, coffee,
and with you, green ink in my pen,
and with you, imaginary reader.
I’m in love with you, recirculated office air
that gets a little too warm, then
a little too cold, because now I am
putting on and taking off repeatedly
this shawl I got long ago
when I was a student,
living in India for the first time,
and it still smells like incense
in Mount Abu, where the lake
was named Nakki, fingernail,
and the surrounding mountains were said
to be holy fragments of the body
of a goddess who fell to earth there.
I was a little in love with her.
I climbed long flights of stone stairs
to visit the mountain cave shrines
where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash.
Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines.
Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory
of how my body felt then: curious
and excited, shy and defiant.
Also you, knowledge of how it feels
now: sometimes tired, or heavy
with sadness and experience,
which are often the same thing,
but other times, electric, connected
back to that person. She didn’t
know much. I wasn’t in love with her
then, but now I see her better.
How she stood unsure on a rural road.
Nowhere she had to be, and the forest
lush and loud all around her.
