Dance of the Unsquared Circles

To lure the taste of chocolate

out of chocolate, add salt.

It’s not the old equation,

only a recipe for sensibility.

Opposites don’t attract, just end up

like the couple that set fire to civility

and chalked a faultline down the center

of possession. Or it’s the other way around —

two people wearing their anger inside out

for twenty years — all that electricity

trapped behind a flickering of false lives.

Call it cold fusion, or misery, or lightning

minus light. Call it whatever you like.

The trick is to find out what charges what —

to know the differences that revolve

in imaginary spaces —

Andromeda and The Milky Way

caught in a waltz of mutual gravity.

Let cardinals bring out the snow in snow.

Let the tree behind bullet-proof glass,

its leaves spindling toward sun,

make you crave an infinity of ocean.

If you want me to love you

write a graffiti of rain-slick roads

across the Sahara of my distance,

tattoo a dusting of particles

onto the terra incognita of my fear.