I confess it’s not the sunflowers in the vase beside the bed
that I love to distraction but the other flowers opening under our hands
beginning to glow with a secret light, the soft clean scent of soap,
not just the way your lips are swollen from kissing or the way
your blind eyes shine, seeing me only in memory, 
the rosy trance of your face, its silver river of beard, 
but more the way we are together in the bed, the gentleness
and then the end of gentleness, the eager hunger of little birds
finding and eating the tiny things they have been seeking
here and now here, the smooth rolling, the sitting up 
and the lying down again, your words that appear and
disappear into the whole dream without reason or volition,
the sounds we make, animals that we are, and near the end
the wash of imminent loss and the coming intolerable grief, 
again remembering that these moments are finite and 
are almost used up, everything, even our tears, 
falling away.