Love Tooth

love tooth: an inclination for love; a strong, especially childish, desire for (see also sweet tooth)

Ancestral light pushes
through the roof of air,

pinpoints we look up at,
imagining we can see

the pulsating heart
of gas and matter and fire

on its way toward us from
so long ago, such distance

that really, it’s just
an echo, an echo of the infinite,

an echo as conceived by
the finite, a mind-body

that says infinity, looking
into vast black skies,

that says eternal, says
universe unending,

that says love,
still, always, and forever,

while kissing the one
she chose to stargaze with,

and who, like you, like all of us,
though of too infinitesimal an age

to be calculated in the light years
reflected in anyone’s eyes,

will kiss again, hard, the beloved
who wears winter’s face,

who wears the face of this world,
like a child in a monstrous mask.