face to face with the sun

It's an absolutely gorgeous (cold) spring day in New York, and I went to the farmers market and got coffee and walked around a little and felt deeply in charity with the world. I had some other poems up my sleeve this morning, but then my girlfriend sent me this one, and you know, yeah. This is a good one. (Among other things, I like that it has a little of the spirit of a sonnet without being anything like a sonnet, and a tiny shout-out to Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.)

Above a pond, I sit on a wooden bench
and throw pebbles into the willows.

A rush of sunlight and wind creates a path in a channel of water, dances
between the melting ice and brown islands of bulrush.

The resident osprey, its eyes the color of yellow grass,
follows my tossing hand.

Love is a diorama of inner life in an outer world.

I look down and find a chunk of fossilized rock
with an entire Paleozoic shell sticking out.

I am not afraid of love, but terrified of how it is my steady guide.

Once, when tired, I wandered off the trail and crawled under a tree to rest.

I woke to a young brown bear licking my boot.
Nothing had ever felt that good.

When I say I love you, what I mean is I wouldn’t leave you.

Even if love is not loved back it doesn’t go away,
although it may become a black hole.

Could this be what it’s like for trees to lose the green from their leaves?

At noon the light shifts and the pond turns
into a mosaic of opaque green ice.

Orange carp rise in these cold watery chambers to breathe at the surface.

Always I am in love. Face to face with the sun. Face to face with the moon.

—Elizabeth Jacobson, "14 Love Songs" from Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Parlor Press, 2019).