When you read a poem by "Alex Dimitrov” titled, simply, “Love”—and discover exactly what you want to carry forward into the new year. An ode to the loved and the loving. An ode, somehow, to life. A model more exquisite than a mantra.

If you haven’t read this poem yet, it’s available on the American Poetry Review website. And you should read it.

You should print it.

You should sit with it in a park and read portions aloud and share the crumbs you love most with pigeons.

Then (then, o then) you should use it as a model for your own ode to love. You should bring your free-range love gaze to bear on life and poem it. Everything you love is worthy of this exercise, I think. And what a way INto a poem-space…. On that note, here’s mine. With gratitude to Alex…

Love

after Alex Dimitrov, unequivocally

I love the way water feels deeper in darkness.

I love the arousing expectation of a green light--and the unfulfillment blister that follows.

I love how no green is sufficient. How no green can be enough for what we want from a meadow. 

I love the intense pelt of hair on his chest, the rug it makes for my face, a soft place after stubble-kissed exfoliation.

I love people who love opera and sing their favorite arias while doing no-count things in a yard.

I love the rancor of grocery-store lines, the simmering human cauldron.

I love hiding, being hidden, knowing less.

I love bark that takes the shape of canyon to court rivulets of rain down a tree trunk.

I love all the humans I've kissed.

I love the humans I've kissed who still can't forgive me for being less than they imagined. 

I love the kindness of being lesser, still least, never best.

I love the way romanian words unclench the knots in my shoulders. The way my name in a native tongue sounds like a silk dress rather than its business-casual, american version. I need someone to speak the soft vowels in me. Often.

I love the bold lonely cold of the massive magnolia, its towering dankness.

I love the psalmed quiet in a room after the rude house-guest leaves. After the rude house-guest packs their complaints and keen criticisms into a tiny knapsack that you hope they will leave on a park bench where squirrels stay busying bury such tidy parcels of violence. 

I love apologies, tears, forgiveness. I love the reckless audacity of earnest apology. I love the humans who love the world enough to admit when they have wronged it. I love the music this makes of a difficult face.

I love movies with subtitles and saxophones posing as streetlamps. I love the lie we tell a lover to help him sleep. I love pressing my ear against his ear and trying to hear his dreams.

I love the musk ox who approaches its possible mate with overwrought anguish, sniffing the vagina, resting its chin on female buttocks, nosing her neck, scraping her flanks with a foreleg, bellowing. 

I love people who have never played Spite and Malice. I love people who walk away from games in the name of violins. 

I love loosestrife, daisy crowns, dishonest violets. 

I love this whole incarnation, the sensual glut of it. 

I love the accidental clumps of confetti that pass for trash after rain.

I love the resolute energy of thunder--how it leaves us with no one to blame.

I love Rilke and Judas and Georges Sand and Maria Tanase and every fool love betrays with penultimate softness. 

I love the bullet that never leaves the gun, never makes its home inside the end of a human, never busts its bored bravado into a mailbox. I love the bulletin against bullets. I love people who love people enough to say so.

I love the woman who is leaving the man who does not deserve her. I love the moment when she knows this irrevocably and not even Sodom tempts her to look back.

I love George Oppen for saying: Relevant thinking begins with the distrust of language, and speaking of poetry. I love how Oppen was always speaking of poetry, or an entryway to ethics, an opportunity to cross the threshold of convention into hard questions. 

I love two-faced words that embody the tension of the turn. The verb cleave, which means to split, divide and to remain faithful to. I love cleaving and what it keeps of leaving.

I love rubbing opposite things against each other to start a small fire. I love rubbing Alabama against Romania and seeing what friction this brings to the poem. 

I love intense defamiliarization. I love what it wants from the dead.

I love sentiments, their slow tempest, an education. In a time when our emotions have been conscripted into self-help regimens of passive-aggressive positivity poses, sentimentality is the black leather jacket, the bad girl, the beast. I love how she wears her torn leather to the kiddie birthday party. I love how she feels all the wrong and wonder-full things.

I love listening to my kids decipher the world without me. I love overhearing new verbs that change their relation to the room.

I love words. I love words. I love watching old couples tango into fury.

I love mountains. And molehills. And I am some. 

I love how my mother loved life--with fanaticism and shamelessness. I love how she was never afraid to show it. Never afraid to raise her arms to the sky and say, Look at this! Breath it in! Can you feel the air living inside you?

I love a joy so sober and direct than no god or drug or drink could claim credit for its presence. 

I love friends who love me when I'm crying. I love friends who cry. I love people who aren't afraid of tears or wet towels or broken sinks.

I love knowing that the good we do for each other exists even in the silence of ingratitude. I love that pride has no actual muscle, only the flicker of a flex in the mirror.

I love the silver mermaid necklace and Coney Island and the things I have done to keep myself free of the the guilt of the fathers, the burdens of the sons.

I love the undevastated sanctus I am writing, living, thinking while a cockroach does his thing on the porch.

I love that Czeslaw Milosz ends his “Ars Poetica” with an injunction: "as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument."

I love knowing that what is possible will not redeem us. I love knowing that what we choose may be held against us. I love knowing that the poem, in its Great Hopingness, wants a dinner from the ghost.

I love the fact that history is not a robot and anything could happen, including kindness.

I love mystics and monks who live in tiny towers like princesses of the lo-fi fabulous.

I love lingering on the threshold of a reminiscence bump and rediscovering my favorite jeans.

I love words. I love words. I love diacritics and all little ornaments of unamerican accents.

I love hiding, being hidden, knowing less.