Poem: Some Spirit Drifts (if not a love poem, an observation-of-love poem)

Insights come to me at Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue. Among them are a zowie re-collection of weirdness (not sharing) from teenage life; a sense of a sweet, hot old couple joining hands and flying to the next phase; a observation of toddler radar--they know when a peer is in proximity and do what they can to acknowledge and scrutinize, maybe nonverbally communicate their expected and ultimate victory over adults.

Some Spirit Drifts

Some spirit drifts between us,
not as barrier but resemblance
why lover thinks he is drawn
to lover. Drifts not exactly as
bridge but more, gravitational
deity. If we open dozing eyes
and note an other like a stroller-
bound toddler at the corner,
sensing there a fellow toddler
twisting body towards his
peer possessor of wily truths
the two have sworn in code
to forget three years hence;

like Walt, more shy with physics
of unity than I first thought, and
comfy Emily quite enough in
her sly petal life, the two poets
hopeless before this spirit
of which I must write, having
wondered it nights into being;

like my nephew and great-nephew
victorious in the Crenshaw
District because they are black
and male and still alive in L.A.;
like any of us awkward and
overly civilized and thus drawn
to the raw. Undeniably false:
that you reading, that you
watching, listening were meant
to be in my arms; and please
recollect I have pondered this
long, being no more an agreed-
upon young. To define the spirit
we are drawn each to each,
yet who believes this, not even
me, not all days anyway,
hungering across a void
more promising than fulfilling.

Sarah Sarai, from The Future Is Happy