Love Poem for the Shape of the Field

The sun opens, shutters. The social scientist wants
to know where to look, keeps widening
her gaze.

Over here on the earth, a girl
fries squash-blossoms with ricotta and sage,
taking only the ones the plant doesn’t need.

There, a boy flicks tiny fireworks, his dark head nimbly snapping down
with the pleasure of the noise.

Is that the moon, soaping the stones?

Someone is taking a bath and notices how their body
is inside time: a slick-fleshed garment loosening on the bone.

Light tinkerbelling here then there makes amethysts
against what it touches. I’m not sure which life is mine.
I slow down and there it is, one cone of light. When I return home

from the field for Passover, the spring light is mellow,
makes ovals across the grass.

Walking by the canal on a cold March day, my brother picks me up,
tosses me over his shoulder, and my sister and I laugh, remembering
when he was small.

My mom and dad let our dog off the leash, and he gallops
through the park—

Helixed with the beautiful came always the terrible. The physicist buried
the centrifuge in the garden. Still, don’t we feel it beneath us, thrumming
in the dark? Clouds fall in flakes. A fire hydrant makes a fountain
over the children’s hands & they fill apple juice bottles over the lit sidewalks.

Inside, the table is brimming and bright. Oh, how I have tried
to interpret the festival, its rehearsal of loss and reward, every spring.
“You can either watch the Seder,” my dad says, “Or, you can sing.”