The feeling he thinks of as love
is liking the sound of her voice
or how she considers laughing
before she smiles,
and though the words he speaks are learned
from radio and 50s musicals
he isn’t that far wrong in thinking
love is like the story he has longed
for years to tell, on such a night as this,
clumsy, no doubt, his fingers
tangled in her shirt, her kiss
so close it feels like someplace in his mind
he hasn’t found till now, a borderland
of rain and firs, some distance from the town
he never quite grew up in, lacking her:
and so he says it, loyal to events
he knows enough to trust – this film, that song –
love you he says, though now it seems for show,
a line that runs so far from what he meant,
it frightens him that thinking made it so.