In Love His Grammar Grew by Stephen Dunn
In love, his grammar rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell madly from the sky like pheasants for the peasantry, and he, as sated as they were, lolled under shade trees until roused by moonlight and the beautiful fraternal twins and and but. Oh that was when he knew he couldn’t resist a conjunction of any kind. One said accumulate, the other was a doubter who loved the wind and the mind that cleans up after it. For love he wanted to break all the rules, light a candle behind a sentence named Shelia, always running on and wishing to be stopped by the hard button of a period. Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look toward a mannequin or a window dresser with a penchant for parsing. But mostly he wanted you, Sheila, and the adjectives that could precede and change you: bluesy, fly-by-night, queen of all that is and might be.
