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Love’s Constant Object
Charles Tarlton

How the hottest fire resolves itself
to ashes, growing cold enough to mark
crosses on children’s brows, so pasions
cool eventually. It takes a bellows
pumping, and a blacksmith to stir
the cooling embers, hammer out fountains
of red-hot sparks, and keep love boiling.
He’d grown older, so had she, and his
touching had to be cleverer, more precise,
the intention clearer, to light the fire.
Because everything happens at once, now
and then the same, everyone, old and young;
yesterday’s sweet thigh kisses still
warm to his quizzical exploratory touch.

—
Charles Tarlton is a retired university professor of political theory who lives and writes poetry on Long Island Sound with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter and watercolorist, and their two female standard poodles, Nikki (black) and Jesse (white).

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