Courtship is pulling with your full-moon heart
to bring out patterns. Patterns dry, crisp tides
that crescent up the beach, past sifted sand,
as sunset comes. When all the shores are dark,
night pulls with courtship’s tides (Love leaves the tides
aside, to push on further up the sand,
to change far pools, to ebb into the heart
of earth and leave it salty, full, and dark).

First collected in Eve (Story Line Press, 1997, Reprinted by Carnegie Mellon University Press Contemporary Classics Poetry Series, 2011).