The largest gaps in our understanding
are the rules of desire and love itself
their details tantalizing as whimsy,
familiar as black cats, or easy cliche.
Song lyrics forever lie about us
sighing truth by accident or intuition only,
as when roses sigh their petals
to summer’s heat or fall’s hard rain.
There are feints, too, as when streams part
around grey resistant stones
either for habit or else ease in the parting
or pretending to part. Love’s current
splashing, caressing its terror–comfort,
lets desire slip closer then rushes past
into the fluid prey drowning itself
between brown earthen banks
spread like the legs of a tall woman
slim, erotic, undulant with flow.
You can tell
by these symptoms:
love's passion
has talons
a beak
feathers
circling flight
predatory instincts.
All these terrors
you desire
although often
there are none.
It is the trick
love plays.
Ed Higgins' poems and short fiction have appeared in Duck & Herring Co.’s Pocket Field Guide, NW Drizzle, Centrifugal Eye, Monkeybicycle and Bellowing Ark, as well as such online journals as Lily, Cross Connect, VLQ, Quick Fiction, and Red River Review, among others. He lives on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon with a menagerie of animals including a rescued pot belly pig named Odious. He teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR.