Love Poem

by Joseph Spece

The prone body

filling alternately
with air and
the length that lost it

No
begin again

To see you
on the north path
stepping nimbly from this
thrust of root to that

Endurance, my love
enduring these days
for the kiss
that won’t come and there

playing at buoyancy

Begin again

Your very sensibility
your expressiveness
The pose in which
you fill a pair of socks

Yes
to have lived
a hundred losses
in watching
your arrangement of hair—

to have coveted there
hand and hair alike

Asleep
joining you at sea

and each
of the violet wakes
that pitch us
from repose

Begin, begin
Begin again

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About the Author:

Joseph Spece is editor at SHARKPACK Poetry Review. His honors in verse include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, artist fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Corrente Prize in Poetry from Columbia University. His first book of poems, Roads (Cherry Grove), appeared in 2013.