AFTER "CHARMING"

...because charm is like love
the way ice is like water

Because to love is to bring water
carried in your hands,
most is squandered along the way,
making it impossible to offer
what you began with.

Because the method is slow and clumsy,
repeatedly not satisfying,
it begins to feel like empty work
only sometimes redeemed
by tripping and losing everything.

And because sometimes the tongue
drinking from the hand forgets
its orginal want and strays
across the palm to the pulse,
tasting a salt path to the inside elbow,

the original metaphor gets consumed
and love changes.
Because love changes its words,
trimming them expertly and close,
we say the wind has changed around it.

And because we see through the explanation
to its contradiction
the way a tongue can be thirsty and not be at once,
we trace opposites in a breath-clouded mirror
which is another way of not explaining need.

And because need is like love
only half the time, the other half
of love must be different, but not necessarily
opposite, because need has no opposite in language
since language does not name what it does not know.

Though we know ice can't live where water
does, though ice in the hand
is no ice,
because water is either with you or falling,
because falling water always knows where it is falling to.

~Suzanne Matson