On the Failure of All Love Poems

I think if love has any use for words
the contact’s vague: fog touching the surface
of a lake, a blind man entering an unfamiliar room.
And if you dare to bring up the moon, taped
and re-taped like a poor kid’s baseball
righteous groans begin to rise from the orchestra
(though they may be crying in the cheap seats)—
everyone knows the moon is all thumbs,
a place human shadows crumple into silt
instantly. What else then? The flowers,
of course the flowers and of course the music
of weekends, the reggae, the Ella, the Bach,
and the side trip to Champlain, which I thought
was ocean; the music of all huge waters.
Lunching on the pier, the paper blew from your
sandwich across the thin beach. When I
brought it back you said love again—
it was when we’d just started saying it.
What else then? The silent return to the
hotel, our bodies moving easy as planet
and moon, until I pointed to a tiny blue
flower growing from a sidewalk crack
and asked you, the botany major, its name.
I remember you laughed, and said it wasn’t
your specialty—it was cultivated, and must
have gotten free somehow to have ended here,
wild and frail. You laughed, and didn’t know.