Late Orison

Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,

the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,

the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually

living it. This time around, let the only fireworks

be those kindled beneath your hands, or mine. O let us have a long,

long time to grow used to each other, many mornings

of tea & toast & reading our terrible first drafts aloud. There will be

clouds, but let them be like those I saw from a prop plane

taking off over a cornfield at dawn: deeply banked & tinted all rose

& purple & gold. Let your arms hold me

a thousand nights, even if it gets old. You & I will grow old, Love,

we have grown old. But this last chance

in our late decades could be like the Pleiades, winter stars seen by

Sappho, Hesiod & Galileo & now by you & me.

Let us be boring like a hollow drill coring deep into the earth to find

its most secret mineral treasures.

Like a constellation that’s always been there, a burning braid of stars

boring through space at the speed of light,

the kind of wild held between bits of cosmic dust—infinite—that will

never stop moving, nor cease to exist.