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...BIRTHDAY POEM FOR THOMAS HARDY by CECIL DAY LEWIS ON BRODSKY'S COLLECTED by MICHAEL S. HARPER IVY by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON TO SAMUEL COLERIDGE UPON HEARING HIS 'SOME I FEEL LIKE A MOTHERLESS..' by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON APPLES OF HESPERIDES by AMY LOWELL THE BOOK OF STONES AND LILIES by AMY LOWELL A DAY IN BED by KATHERINE MANSFIELD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: REV. LEMUEL WILEY by EDGAR LEE MASTERS |