The Little Kind
That’s the kind of punch a little love packs.
The Little Kind
Occasionally, though less now
than half your lifetime ago, you still feel it,
don’t you? A papercut in the life
you thought you were leading,
a small arrhythmia in the familiar pattern.
That’s what a little love is. Just a little,
not the soul-inflaming kind, or the familial
that will carry you, in sickness and in health,
to death. Even little loves, after all, can aggravate,
lead to fantasies of boxing or other unreasonable
heroics, of taking a beating but standing up because
that’s the kind of punch a little love packs.
Would you rather be dumb and happy
or intelligent and sad? someone asked
on the lawn of a party
where I contemplated
why we had it so good.
I would like to feel a little love and a little sad
and know they are the same and different,
to notice a shock of color that was never there, purple
where gray used to permeate, chickweed
in a concrete crack. That’s all the change
I actually need at this stage of life:
a splash of the overlooked, a reminder
of how we look.
