Love at its start and at its finish

Love at its start and at its finish is not
a sentiment


              but in your arrival a restless
fury, eye of cyclones, the dream 
of a fossilized gaze
smashed under amber
arrangement of stars
in the air and on your face – 

each step a last judgment.

Sentiments change, but not the struggle
between the life that seeks out life
and the life that seeks out death.

Love, hold me tightly, can you feel it?

muted, howling in the streets of Italy
and in what Italy’s becoming
among blood’s scintillas and rude
waiters
something that knows not your name, and

like a killer, no eyes no past
grazes and poisons all the day’s names.

But you love at the start and at the finish
call out to the wind, invent new paths of return
don’t leave the these plazas deprived of you

hands on cribs, cars 
aligned against the sun
and poems and women, these crazy women