#for jeff

Song of the Anti-Sisyphus

for Jeff

I want to start a snowball fight with you, late at night in the supermarket parking lot. I want you to do your worst. I want to put the groceries in the car first

because it’s going to get nasty. Because I was reading today in the science section of the paper that passionate love lasts only a year, maybe two, if you’re lucky.

Because I want to be extra, extra lucky. Because the article apologized specifically to poets—sorry, you hopeless saps—as though we automatically believe in love more

than anyone else (more than carpenters, kindergarten teachers, novelists) & have been pushing this Non-Truth on everyone. Because who knows what will happen,

but I want to, baby, want to believe it’s always possible to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years, four decades. I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight

in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter inside my lungs. Inside my brain & dream. I want to eat the unplowed street & the fog that’s been erasing

evergreens. I want to eat the fog only to discover it’s some giant’s lost silver blanket. I want to find the giant & return to him his treasure.

I want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map drawn in snow by our shadows shivering. I want to shiver against you, into you. I want the sound

of your teeth. I want the sound of the wind. I want to be like the kids with their plastic sleds, gliding down, all the way down the hill, then trudging

their sleds & snow-suited bodies all the way back to the top. I want to be how they do this, for hours, till sunset, till some sensible someone has

to come drag them away from the snow, the slope, the 3…                    2…                 1! of joy. I want to be the Anti-Sisyphus, in love

with repetition, in love, in love. Foolish repetition, wise repetition. I want more hours, I want insomnia, I want to replace the clock tick with tambourines. I want to growl,