Love

By Sarah DiLeo

Here is where we are.

A small, weathered boat

rowing  and rowing,

gathering words and days.

Every morning, you’re here

combing tangles from your hair.

A wild hawk glimpsed from the road,

an offhand miracle.

In the house we share

I fold a t-shirt, fold it again

carefully, a precious thing, a mine.

It is hard in this life not to feel small,

to let the ravenous fist of need rise up.

Lao Tzu says:

‘This is it.

no one else has the answer,

no other place will be better,

it has already turned out.’

The hard brown certainty of this.

The searing freedom.

We fell in love on the beach

that old shelf with its jars of despair, of longing.

You danced from the cigar box of my imagination

into the breathing air.

Always around us,

operatic dunes,

watchful moon on water,

the quieting murmur of grass in the wind.

The ache of the possible.

Is there a not-trite way to say you change everything?

Does it matter?

There is the naming of the hawk, and there is the hawk

and its gasping, unbearable beauty.

Where do you find love?

Sarah DiLeo is the integrated content producer for the production company Tool, and co-producer of The Kibitz podcast, a project of Reboot.