A Love Poem (for a friend?)

It is in the stillness at the end of the day,
In the final breath before I get up
to get ready for bed,
that I feel my love for you
tugging with the weary weight of gravity
on my heart.
The hum of the refrigerator,
the sting of how I miss you,
and the single dim light of my living room,
seem to be the last constants
of the night.

Hearts are such strange and childish things
To feel with such abandon
And to want so selfishly,
And to love so stupidly,
And to fear loneliness-- or hurt, or our ability to hurt others--
so irrationally,
And all this so compassionately:
How beautifully human we are.

I have been carrying you in my heart all day
like a morning routine,
or the smell of old books,
or the stark sight of a green mountain under a blue sky;
it is arresting,
overwhelming,
a silent secret burning a hole
in my back pocket,
a sudden flip of the stomach
that hits me like a homesickness,
even when I'm already home:
You are so heavy to hold.

But, oddly enough, I love this about
loving you;
as a poet's philosophical nonsense:
it is the gratitude we feel
at the honor of getting to love; it is the weight of it
that makes it worth it.
And though my prayers for you are too nebulous and giant to fit into mere flimsy words,
it would seem presumptuous to want anything for you anyway,
but to carry you a bit longer.
So I don't mind how tongue-tied I am
in the silent depths of my heart. Honestly,
I don't know how to do this anyhow.

This is how I imagine we love,
Like desperate drunkards sopping our way
Through a constellation of moments
That have no map,
Mixing our metaphors into
Our drinks
And wondering if,
when Jesus commented on the blind leading the blind,
He was only talking 1 parts about pharisees,
The other 3 parts about-- well, everyone.
Hearts and heartbreaks are universal, love like
plastic threads tying us all together in our memories,
melting into sticky knots
and making abstract art out of the whole business;
I sometimes wonder why
God didn't make our souls a little less fragile,
A little less messy,
a little lighter to hold.

But then,
I suppose if our hearts were
so nearly titanium,
we might not be quite so human anymore.

And loving might not be so worthwhile-

and this poem
might never have even been necessary.

But when is a poem ever,
really
necessary?

Nostalgia

Fall arrives suddenly
With a brisk morning and a blue sky
So clear it seems fragile;
And with it gut-fulls of memories 
I didn't know I still carried
From a previous life of mine:
a déjà vu flood of anticipation-- for what?, I wonder --
My affection for walking on new England's hurried streets, 
The sound of Haydn's string quartets,
And the taste of pumpkin spice lattes.
But this morning, I watch from my hill 
As the sun climbs
Over the nearby blocks:
Mechanical mover men, sleeping houses,
Silent streets and the song of homecoming birds on my back yard tree--
And I wonder how it is possible to be so grateful for home,
That your heart yearns
for the very present that you are already in.