At 3 A.M. It's Unfair to Ask

You always ask
"must we mean what we say?"
You speak of bridges, of indeterminacies,
of a lack of universal.
And in some mean sense,
I agree.
But it's late October; the evenings
are far too short for Rorty and discussions of meaning.
What I mean now,
with the cool wind coming over your shoulder
and your hair forgetting its length,
is that we should go down into the park
and pass beneath the pines and the trellising jasmine
to see what the stars smell like in this crisp October air,
to see how the ants rearrange the earth beneath us,
to seek out the lake that moves slightly
leaving its rings around the sand shore
the way a strong red leaves its legs,
begging for sugar, begging for its body back
the way we all do.

If the ants haven't taken the hill to the north of the lake,
if the wine is good, the path silent, and the earth
round enough to land us in a clearing,
maybe we will find some point of perspective
that will allow us to love
the length of the moon falling from apogee.
And if after the dew falls
across our bared bodies
we should submit to saying nothing at all,
submit to the rising and falling of chests on a cold ground,
we will both understand, thick as grammar,
what it is we mean to say to each other and the world and the ants,
as the owls fade to sparrows
and the sun pulls the day over its horizon.