Like many poems, I am scrambing from somewhere to somewhere else to write one down because each is sudden, fleeting. I must hurry. Earlier this week I slid across my bedroom (wood flooring) to get something good down, a poem about some family. Even earlier in the week, I pulled off to the side of the road to punch this one into my phone.

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I Love You

Sometimes it sounds like old
road-hit deer bone under your tires,

Sometimes it sounds like two leaves
brushing at some pine straw,

Sometimes it sounds like lying on those
leaves, or like a pecking at those leaves by something small

and flightless, and Sometimes, in more common
settings, it sounds like someone dropping many

tiny somethings onto a bigger something, like BBs
against butcher paper slowly, like rain,

and Sometimes it is rain,

Sometimes it sounds like when you sit
on a balloon and the pop is subsequent,

and the pop is rattling all of your bones,
and your buttocks,

Sometimes it sounds like birds sound -- hundreds
of sparrows that are well taken care of, a thunderstorm of them,

Sometimes it sounds like a distant crack, an M80
weeks after the fourth, a child in the street

with his matchbox, a child clutching his ears
and lurching over, so ready to light another,

and another and another and another.

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