WATER IN LOVE
- Akshay Maheshwari
- Mar 26, 2023
- 1 min read
How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
each time you take a sip
Impossible to savor
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell
When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it
Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret
Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched
Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children
A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without
How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and inmost virtuoso
of every snowflake
Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain
Deepest of miracles
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate
from Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019) by Ed Bok Lee
