Love Song in Bower

…through it we are moving as always it is through
that one professes a faith in movement, for what else might
dictate thinking, what else in the air but a fallacious
leaf falling, desiccating. A leaf falls, desiccates. My eye is dry,
your eye is wet. We are speaking. The light is cached, it is
very intentional, and I am going into the machine that is
foliage and which happens all over and which is not
foliage exactly but its attendant shades. It is a palanquin.
It carries is or—we separate, we move away. We
turn back toward each other, exchange eyes. We speak.
Had we bicycles we might circle the trees and between
and sense the pleasure of distance between sun and trees
and us, the way shadows are made into cooling effects,
trees masseurs, but we are walking. Time stretches prehensile
is the sort of thing one might permit oneself to say
as though on set, speaking sentences but
judiciously. Of what light-encrusted twigs hang above us
that work us into subjects. And what requisite furred things
and perfect remoteness from urban din (parenthetical
park) and kindred forms compose us as we scavenge
for things on which to speak. For we are speaking. Red leaves
are falling as prodigies are falling. My pathos is wound
like a clock. Your thoughts are pendulums. Everything true
is true about metaphors. And my heart is gelatin
and your heart is set. There is a cruelty, there is a slight
incline, a ‘relief’—we’ve found the apposite
surface features for our affects. Summer deepens
into a wasp. We have words instead of thoughts. I as
a bundle of nerves, you as strings of a violin. The wind
plays on your neck. I incur a wrath. The sky is
distressed. We are still. We are speaking. I like how you
‘open a space,’ you like how my ‘language folds.’
Everywhere there is interiority like dew I feel like.
Summa is a wingèd creature. The trees are moving.
We are speaking. The trees are moving. I am speaking
but softly, like rustling, like being moved
by a creature, deadpan turtledove, tinted scrollwork,
what softness this.

Aditi Machado’s Emporium (Nightboat, 2020) received the James Laughlin Award for a second volume of poetry. She is also the author of Some Beheadings (2020) and several chapbooks, the most recent of which is an essay called The End (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). She works as an Assistant Professor at University of Cincinnati.

“Love Song in Bower” was originally published in Bat City Review Issue 14.