In Missoula, someone has punched ML L BR into the stucco ceiling of the motel room with a coat-hanger-end and surrounded it with punctures in the shape of a heart, so that those making love below will gaze up at the signature of love above. But I am not making love, and the only person I can remember loving is a boy dead thirty years whose face has long since been amalgamated into all children with cow-brown eyes. Under the heart and a lamp made for an imaginary monastery, I watch us in the hip boots of our fathers' galoshes make dinosaur tracks through the swamp, bend over jello-wobbly clumps of frog spawn where licorice tadpoles circle inside their crystal eggs and, as the spring warms, our hands together - brown and speckled, grubby and scabbed - try to catch the quick-slime leaps of what is both fish-tailed and land-legged among last year's cattails holding up their fruit like frankfurters on toasting forks. In the mirror's reflection of motel glasses, wrapped neatly as hothouse tomatoes, I know death has made no barrier between us but bonded with a strength as a broken bone heals so that I live both finned and footed, whole as life and death beneath the signature of love on the ceiling. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ECHOES: 9 by WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: SETH COMPTON by EDGAR LEE MASTERS ETERNITY by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD MORE WALKS by RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM SONG IN THE NIGHT by OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM A NEW PILGRIMAGE: 5 by WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT |