Oh muse, tell me of love.
What of the troubadours and Shelley and Keats?
What of Hafiz and Rumi and Kabir?
Tell me of women
and the heart inside the heart.
Three and thirty years have run
through these azure veins
and the beginnings of some canyon
have begun to form in my chest.
What do these geological formations say
about the state of my love?
I am a coyote howling
for the sweetness of the distant moon,
alone in this desert that is never lonely.
Some say that love between two people
is a guise for the Beloved, that we grow
in the gardens of the soul
from the roots of such love.
Oh Eric, whatever the tricky layers of geology may attempt,
you are forever found in the deep ocean of your chest.
