This Is How You Compose A Love Poem by Michael H. Bownstein

THIS IS HOW YOU COMPOSE A LOVE POEM

The sparrow hawk in the tree is not who I am,

lemon seed, flicker brush, the decay of skunk grass.

 

I follow to where the path goes through the belly of bark

into the skinny trail of hammer thronged ants,

 

wheel bird beetles and a flourish of sapsucker bees.

Here the way is blocked, here the way continues,

 

This is how you compose a love poem from the sighting 

of a bird on a tree near the cone heads and boulders,

 

the end of a plain and a playing field, a thin waterway, 

the land of flesh eating darters and mud bottom bass.