Loves

The gentleman in black and olive loves
The elegant lady inside the house
Printing affectionate views of the world
She spies decaying into complex life:
Broken-down trucks, crushed appliances, joy
Effervescing from lost layers of paint,

Each poured to obscure even older paint,
All reemerging, the way weather loves
To reveal backwards, the way years enjoy
Carefully disassembling the house
Of existential truths, of time and life,
Old magazines insulating the world

Against cold erasure, as if the world
Cared whether records were kept. Peeling paint,
Crumbling foundations, cracked joints, it's all life,
Rich and inevitable, and she loves
To catch it living in each canyon and house
Where time leaves its tracks of dark, secret joy.

Her man outside on the porch stoop enjoys
Being treated to her view on the world,
Her discoveries of fresh beauties housed
In the wreckage where he conjectured pain
As the architect, one reason he loves
Her who makes it possible to love life.

He had cultivated a view of life
In which all the satisfaction, the joy
Came from complete renewals, and he loved
Floods, obliterations, the way the world
Could remake itself with snow for paint,
Burying pasts to the eaves of the house,

Promising to seal him inside that house.
Glaciers and sandstorms that mummified life
Appealed to him, although he knew fresh paint
Could never seal tightly enough to joy
To keep it from decay, he dreamed a world 
Preserved that she has now exposed and loved.

He is her house now, open to her joy,
Shedding layers of life, bare to the world,
Weathered paint, exposed and exposing loves.