Prose Poem # 264

Without a doubt

there is nothing more difficult to write than a poem about the discovery of love. How, for example, to write about the surface: the regularity of meals, the occassional movie, the long conversations about nothing? Well, not nothing precisely, but then what is so important about this quiet unraveling of history and presence, like a discovering a particularly glittering vein of water from a desert bedrock, the liquid sluicing away the centuries of dust and stone, darkly coloring the ground? We feed each other information in trickles: your birthday, the worst book you’ve read, the greatest rock band in the world. We wait for the ocean to arrive, swallowing the dry land, lapping at our feet. You sip your coffee and stare silently into the black depth, your fingers splayed like sunrays across the polished table. I clink my spoon against the china. Every time, we chip away a little more of the layer, patient for the day when we arrive at the center of the world. This is what we do every Friday night, feeding this constant need to unearth more. Lovers are like archeologists. They are the destroyers of worlds.