Fawning

No one taught you how to love
but you can fix an outboard motor.

I've come to expect incredible tenderness
alongside incredible cruelty.

In diving into your emptiness
I become the vessel.

You offer approval to anyone who will take it
since you can't give it to yourself.

Did you ever think, maybe, Nature wasn't thinking of you,
when it felled the tree in the storm last week?

Did it occur to you that Nature wasn't thinking of
You, in particular?

When the branch fell, when the flood rose,
when the mushrooms clung to the bark like beauty marks

on the trunks of bodies.
An emotional sponge:

we make love, and I leave
with your sorrow inside me.

Christie Flemming