My Mars and I

You speak to me of my Mars and Jupiter and
its moons, and the tides and eddies
of the universe, chaos incarnate and the birds (and
the bees) and the realities and counter-realities and
the bones and songs and the highs and lows between
high-brow and one long moan

And perhaps I will love you, or think I love you, or think
"Maybe it would be right to love you"--
if our planets align, it would be divine.

*

Someday, when I will have forgotten
everything about you, everything
that I imagined or believed, grinding into cosmic dust,
reborn: a poem about someone (else)

Someday, this poem will have become
no signpost, but a ballerina for the forgotten soldier:
twist me right and I will dance, and dance, and dance
waiting for your words to stop me, yet

there is no ballerina; you haven't read the fairytale
so, in the end, there is nothing: I cannot love you,
for you are not a poet and I am not a word
or perhaps, not one that you've remembered;
who knows what goes on in a foreign mind?

In love, all minds are foreign, and one is of import, but
there is a paraplegic poet who doesn't believe
in nothing, or that which has been "nothing" (least of all
love), and if I want to call this "love", secretly, quietly,

I whisper, why not? I should not (I will not), but I can.

*

Unrelenting and unseeing, a grudging date
the world turns until I yield, and sigh, and
without waiting to be turned, finally, I dance.