This is how my heart works, you see?

There is a white stone cliff

over a dropping slope

sliced along with bare trees.

In the center of the cliff

is a round dry fountain of polished stone.

By seizing my whole body up as I clench my hand

I am able to open the fountain

into a drain, revealing below it the sky,

the trees, a brown and uncertain ground.

This is how my heart works, you see?

This is how love works?

Have some sympathy for the great spasms
with which I must open myself to love
and close again, and open.

And if I leapt into the fountain, there is just no telling:
I might sever myself clean, or crack the gold bloom of my head,
and I don't know what uncertain ground I might fold on like a sack.

[Max Ritvo {1990-2016}, 'Crow Says Goodbye', from Four Reincarnations]