“Nothing gets right in Love because / Of Time, and Motion; poetry touches that” (p.73). Love is key to Totem, infusing and inseparable from the poem’s other core themes. The couple who witness the Creation’s fireworks display are real, physical bodies. Their love is the realest thing there is, diaphanous yet solid — “Her nakedness is all” (`(Naked),’ p.43) — from the atoms spraying out of their emotions to the galactic disruptions causing their thinking:

sound waves fought their way
through air. But light was the medium itself.
Thousands of birds, the tiniest birds, adorned your hair.

… I drew my love from
geometry.
(pp.17-8)

With its disarming turns of phrase — “I am very tired and I am rather in love,” p.19 — I came to my senses. “She said I came, I came to my senses really fast / and you liked it.”