Love Hides in the Strangest Places

Quinn McIlhone

I do not fall in love in a day or a week,

I fall in love

in a quarter hour.

I am in ecstasy,

the world bathed

in a liquid glow.

Music is glorious.

I hear every note,

wringing new meanings

from old lyrics

as if listening

for the first time.

The everyday is charged

with sudden significance,

the world transformed

from prosaic

to paradisiacal,

a walk to the grocery store

a stroll through Eden.

The first time I see her

in natural light,

her face is framed

by the noonday sun.

Her hair is ginger, the sun gold,

I have never seen

a prettier girl.

We take the stairs to her office

and she walks beside me,

small, delicate, vulnerable,

skin white as heaven

in the light of the stairwell,

reddish hair incendiary.

I don’t want to possess her,

I don’t want to own her.

I am simply filled with joy

at the notion she exists,

lives in the same city as me

and walks the same streets.

By some miracle there is a person

who doesn’t talk baseball

or kitchen renovations,

and that she is attractive

strikes me as wonderful indeed,

a marvellous conjunction

of circumstances.

I pursue her shamelessly

till she sits across from me

framed by candlelight,

a real person

with a history, psychology

and manner all her own.

An improbable curl

falls to her forehead

and her eyelids droop

when the liquor hits.

Her eyes are blue, not brown,

and bloodshot over

a goofy, contented smile.

She has a dozen faces,

all of them delightful.

She is flighty as a bird,

but when I hold her,

calm her down

and offer reassurance,

she feels love and becomes

a contented child.

I get hung up

on her cheeks

and kiss them

a thousand times.

I can kiss her for hours.

She has a mouth like velvet.

Her skull is tiny

and I take her hair in my hands

and breathe love into her.

She has thin arms and tiny hands

and they are never still.

She rearranges my hair,

fondles my ears,

touches my chest.

She is so light

she can lie on me and listen

to my heart till dawn.