Dave Bonta's "Love song" strips romance down to something blunt and animal. The speaker calls himself a dog and the person he addresses a crow, two creatures that scavenge. Together they find dead things and eat them. It's an odd way to describe love, but the poem seems to say that what binds these two is a shared hunger and a willingness to live off what's left over.
The third stanza adds a twist: "as customs ate us." The speaker suggests that social rules and traditions have already consumed the couple, so they now feed on remains just as society fed on them. By the end they've become "this sum of a cloud," which hints at something vague and dissolving, as if they've lost their separate shapes. The poem ends on "our wedding night," with no verb and no resolution.
The mood is dark, strange, and a little tender. It feels bleak, yet there's closeness in the pairing, as though being outcasts together is a kind of intimacy.