Dance of the Unsquared Circles

The trick is to find out what charges what

To lure the taste of chocolate out of chocolate, add salt. It’s not the old equation,

only a recipe for sensibility. Opposites don’t attract, just end up like the couple that set fire to civility

and chalked a faultline down the center of possession. Or it’s the other way around — two people wearing their anger inside out

for twenty years — all that electricity trapped behind a flickering of false lives. Call it cold fusion, or misery, or lightning

minus light. Call it whatever you like. The trick is to find out what charges what — to know the differences that revolve

in imaginary spaces — Andromeda and The Milky Way caught in a waltz of mutual gravity.

Let cardinals bring out the snow in snow. Let the tree behind bullet-proof glass, its leaves spindling toward sun,

make you crave an infinity of ocean. If you want me to love you write a graffiti of rain-slick roads

across the Sahara of my distance, tattoo a dusting of particles onto the terra incognita of my fear.

Lori Lamothe is the author of three poetry collections, Trace Elements, Kirlian Effect and Happily.