collision / collaboration

Let me tell you a story of us. How we walk, unhurt,
on our various roads, ambling among the sidelined clover,
stooping low to tie shoes, pick dimes out of the dirt,
watch a month of sunsets go by, sleep, then start over.

It would be so easy to stay sashaying along the fences,
skipping over fallen petals, langorous when it rains, or still
as silence, as the period that ends all sentences.
But we get tired of the flat expanse of highway. We want hill,

movement, some shape to mark our steps, and felicity
comes in the form of a fork in the road, a sign
that says, Merge ahead. Words full of electricity
and yearning and promise. I see you and think "You're mine"

now, although we are never quite the other's, not in the way
the storybooks would have it, two shadows fusing into one
as the closing credits roll. In this story, we simply
intersperse ourselves, dappling our color where there is none,

entwining with the other's easy brightness, and grateful
for the chance of this vicarious pleasure, this larger vision
of fertile acreage, the blooms remarkably faithful
even as the asphalt stings from our collision.

This is what love is, I tell myself. Not just the smack
of a road against the other but something smaller, unassuming.
Two roots taking hold of themselves, then climbing back
in tandem, mottling the earth with new and vigorous blooming.