Learning Love’s Natural Laws

He loved her like a fist closing around a river,
knuckles whitening as the current ran blue and wild.
He built fences out of railroad iron and promises,
dragged them across fields of her breath,
believing motion could be arrested,
that desire would stand still if he shouted its name.

His wanting learned to pace,
a wolf circling its own reflection in ice,
muscle and hunger blurring together.
He pulled her by the gravity of his fear,
a tide that swelled and withdrew too fast,
salting every tender thing it touched.

Possession ate the light:
windmills stalled and birds veered off mid-sky.
They became a traffic snarl of hands and expectations,
heat rising, engines revving nowhere,
love mistaken for leverage,
motion confused with control.

Then the opening…

A loosening, like spring runoff.
He learned the only love he can possess is that for the self,
a hearth he tended, not a chain he threw.
From there, love moved outward as weather does:
shared breath, open field, a generous being,
love lived, not held, offered to her, to trees, to rain.

Such became a fulfillment of their remaining years,

Thus a father and mother found peace as

withered hands held each other most of their waning years.