Heartspeed

This is a love poem to the way I know how to love what I know.

I love
   your sleeping body, your arms draped across your chest in self-embrace,
          the rise and fall of your breath from lungs and throat and mouth
               that once expelled air to form the words, "Marry me?"
   your eyelids drawn down like the bedsheets you once bought for my birthday,
          on which we made love and I, gazing in your eyes,
               felt for the first time that kind of release where the self is lost.
   your beautiful mind, your keen sight, your soft heart,
          the safety in the circle of your shoulders and hands,
               that ring of light, the portal of letting-go.

Sunlight
   warmed the skin between my knees and thighs this morning;
   particles, eight minutes ago, expelled from the sun,
   hurled toward earth in careless release from elemental forgery and,
   after mere clock-ticks in dark space, touched the pale places of lovers reclining
   as emanations of this solar-wind life-breath -
   intertwined love as bodies seeking to draw together.

The heart only knows
   to see in light speed
   through the space between
   the lover and beloved.