February 09, 2006
A poem for Valentine's Day.
Love is like a bird!
Love flits from tree to tree,
singing its song,
its feathers glinting in the sun
though some types of love are flightless,
and some scientists in Israel once created an outcry
by breeding a love without feathers,
which they claimed would make it cheaper to cook
and eat.
Though not all kinds of love
can sing,
some kinds of love
can swim short distances,
in order to
catch fish.
There are anywhere between eight thousand and ten thousand types
of love, and though a hundred and twenty are thought to have
gone extinct in the span of human history,
love remains the most diverse of all
terrestrial vertebrates.
A central metaphor comparing a man wrongly accused of rape to
a certain kind of love is the inspiration
for the title of Harper Lee’s only novel, “To Kill A Mockinglove,”
which takes place in Alabama,
(whose state love is the Yellowhammer,
AKA the Northern Flicker.)
A DJ about to play a romantic ballad might be heard to remark,
"here's a song for all you loveloves out there."
Watching a scavenger form of love eviscerate a carcass
then regurgitate the chewed-up meat into the mouths of its
tiny little love babies in their lovenest,
you can see why many scientists speculate
that love descended
from dinosaurs.