The Grammar of Love
by Theodora Goss

I love you I love you I love you
goes the poem,
except of course it sounds better in the language,
agglutinative, inflected,
of that other country, where I love you
is one word, consisting of
the word love, and then a grammatical ending
which means I am saying this to you,
it is a message just between us,
I to you, as though I were sending a letter
specifically to you, like one of those thin
blue sheets we used to send,
covered on both sides, almost indecipherable
from the attempt to include as much information
as possible in the airmail envelope.
Or a pigeon that has been trained to return
only to your hand, carrying a scrolled
up message attached to its ankle.
It is the same ending as in
I wait for you,
I search for you,
I call to you.
Which I do, by airmail, by pigeon post,
by this poem, carried on the wind,
hoping that you
will send a word, similarly inflected,
back.

(The image is A Spray of Goldenrod by Charles Courtney Curran.)