When freckled light blooms from city streets
We cling to one another
I cannot separate your exhalation
From the delicate air I breathe.
I wrote you a letter with the first breath I took
I’ve written you every moment since
Your name has steadfast sat on the tip of my tongue
But darling, while for so long words escaped
Your half-moon heart I know so well
For my star shines from the other side
Celestial marvels apart
But oh sweet love,
Together we are full
I took my patiently longing letters and sent them
Beseeching each stranger, stop light and song to be my postmen
I prayed that the conversations between our searching souls could rise to paint the sky–so that the stars might mirror your freckles, the moonlight the glow in my eyes
Our perfect haze of what will be
Heaven drew maps on our palms
So that each time we sat with our head in our hands
We could trace the paths worn into our calloused skin
To see how much closer we’d come
To sharing no more paper words
Besides the Times between us
On sleepy Sundays
I didn’t know my map was torn in two
That when the path seemed most to come to a solemn stop
You would reach out to shake my atlas palms, my compass heart
Repeat words I’d say for decades to come after long days
Hello, my love. It’s so good to be home.
We have our own language, you and I
When the two of us talk with our hands
I read the braille of your goose bumps
My fingertips sing to your sideways smile
As my skin memorizes moments
That age will one day forget into silken shadow
Take my hand and we’ll walk
Tell me your mother’s favorite flower and your father’s favorite book
I’d like to know how many widths of my pinky finger
Fit in the spaces of your spine
The capacity of your lungs when full
And the moments that make you breathe that deeply
Grand views or the Old Italian woman’s laughter making the inbound bus fly
Is there a way to quantify exactly how much envy the Milky Way pours into your irises?
You wear fear patched on your sleeve and you’ve stitched it so tight
It will require a lot of adventures, storms, stories, sun and stumbles for it to fray
But that cocktail is by large my favorite sandpaper
I will wear a ferocious brand of domesticity
I will care so hard it blisters my soul; knowing full well callouses make it hard to call me “pretty”
The first time I saw you
I swear in the indelible elegance of our irises igniting
I didn’t fall in love–love fell through me
I want to wear that love on so much more than my ring finger
Tattoo your sunsets on my rib cage
So that I can jump-start dawn with each beat of my heart
I want to wear your love on my pinkies
So you can laugh at feigned propriety when I sip wine at the bistro downtown
Don’t be my umbrella
Be the forgetfulness and the whisper in my ear when it rains
Teaching trust that the sun will come
Be the sun when it comes
I want to wear your love in my laughter.
When I taste those iridescent words,
I mean that I want to promise you poetry and tree bark and starry skies and nights asleep in our little home
When I say I love you, I mean that I promise…
I promise to spend every moment of the rest of my life loving you
And when those moments float away like firefly embers into the night
I promise to take your hand and step into entropy
To choose one of those evanescent pinpricks and learn to exist as light
I promise to never give up
To never grow complacent
To spend every day learning how to love you even better
Because of that
I promise to love you courageously
I want to love you in a world of little things
Bottles of wine on Tuesdays
Breakfast in bed
Mountain drives
And kisses you never saw coming
I promise to always be kind to you
I will not call you anything that is not love
I will not let anger run in my veins
I will be honest
I will be soft
I promise to set butterflies free in my chest each time you walk through the door after work
To hold your hand when you’re scared and your heart when it’s heavy
Let these words be a promise—not because there will be moments where we can’t remember
But because I want you to be able to hold in your hands the overflow of joy we pour into one another’s worlds.
The answer we both hold locked in our hearts. The truth that must never be uttered until perhaps that day, when we meet in a coffee shop along some drawling avenue in some drizzly city.
I never quite could grasp it.
How the shimmering sheen of your gaze
Could enrapture me
Swiftly, purely
Entwine me in unfaltering arms I’m yet to hold.
Thickets of thorn, baby’s breath
Unraveling
Slivering, shimmering, silken threads
Threads to follow
To twist round your pinkies
In delicate bows
Moments of satiated solitude,
Forget me not love
Forget me not.
Lights return me
To hazy meadows
Of golden shine
Of simpler time
A twist of daisies
A square of sunlight across a quiet bench
Resting, waiting,
All to resume
Your palms pressed on mine
The melody of moment.
Did you hear the echoes of days passed by?
A solemn stillness in our eyes.
Your life may be a melody I’ve never heard but its notes are etched in my skin.
Please put your hands around my humanity
Hold me in the soft warmth of your palms,
Don’t let out my light
Call me your baby
Call me your darling, your dear, your love of your life
Call me whatever you’d like
But please,
Call me.
Sit with me in summer meadows
I’d like to dream with you, my dear.
Let lilac air kiss your skin
Willow breath will brush the braille of goosebumps,
Preserve each word in boughs of golden green
Stay close to me,
The embrace of mountains will keep us warm tonight.
Darling, I’d like to grasp the galaxies in my palm for you
Fill my wholeness with sweet orchard air
Allow my exhalation to scatter the starlight into your dark nights
This map you gave me before we were
Always most true when I wish it were not
The mountains and forests and train tracks I’ve crossed
We are both here,
Together, wherever, whatever lies between.
I am shadowing berceuses through lawless meadows
To see if you are the one whispering this shanty soliloquy
Your song is the only echo to each beat of my heart
Louder, love.
Tonight the moon is a chair
I’d like to step softly to a staircase of starlight
Sink slowly into slippered silence
Wind my way through the hush of nighttime breezes, their fingers dancing in my hair.
I would like to summit the sky
To curl into the curve of this crescent moon and count constellations
So far from familiar and somehow still so at home,
My head on your chest serving as gravity enough to hold me here always.
Will you meet me there?
I know that you can hear the song
In the empty space at the end of a rustling newsprint page
Palmed from one arthritic hand to its partner
Glances and the introverted extraversion of a stifled chuckle
Breathing mystery into the blur passing us by
Those evenings when I am so unsure of whether the conductor’s voice conjures the particular station
Or if that certain space simply sings songs into our proximity.
Don’t hold it in, my love.
Look into my eyes hard
How we’ve always been too afraid to do, and know.
When the world breathes in the whole of humanity and exhales only melody,
I can hear it too.
This exhalation haunts so heavily
This tip-toed, starry-eyed sound silences long-hushed streets and fields
Contemplation bordering on insanity
Anchoring hands tattooed on tree bark, toes in streams, cicadas in ears
Moonlight combing through leaves
Conspiring with the breeze to whisper little shimmering loves from the slivered sky
Her messages carried by barn owls and the foreign midnight babble of water on stones
From my bedrock soul to Orion, down a staircase of stars, home to you.
Somehow we were both born speaking lullaby languages that no one else can hear.
The only secret is that there is one.
You’re searching too,
Let’s not wander alone.
Breathe like the woods are watching
Tangling your exhalation with dawn drawn rose
Break my pulse over your knee
With wanted words on your tongue
While the crack of pine knots floods the Milky Way
Bury your gaze in daffodil flames
Finding symphony silence
In bright embers constellating
Do not be so afraid
The songs of the silence
Deafen only the dark
I need you to know that the thought of “you” makes me want to run barefoot through rainstorms
As if somehow the clouds might contain the condensation of your city
As if I could dance in the dewdrops evaporated from your sweating glass on a windowsill, wherever it is you are
I want you to know that at night I imagine I can count the street lamps from you, to me
I want to pluck them from the ground, one by one, like wildflowers, until I have a shimmering bouquet of softly petaled light
I want to hand them to you, become captured in the infinity of your irises, and say,
“I’m here now, love. It’s nice to meet you.”
This evening it poured
I had an umbrella in my handbag
I left it there
The dewy spiderwebs of my hair meeting rainwater, plastered on my rosy cheeks
You always said it worked at summer camp
When they’d throw water on your sleepy head
We stack humanity in little boxes
Miles high in whimsical warehouses we like to name after stolen things
People, places nobody remembers anymore
Cities are the loneliest lovers of all
Drawling avenues long enough to reach through steely glass
Yearn for times before humanity learned to live in midair
Learned to talk with their hands without touch.
She knows all the ways home
And every avenue is a way home
If you make the right turn.
I still collect pennies of you in mason jars
The lid laced tight so as not to allow any sunshine to escape
The whispers of wanderings
We once traveled through
I still send you light
I will search for you on train platforms
In each melody that spills from my mind
I dreamt you could hear me
When I whisper to the city lights with each exhalation of frosty breath
I felt you were real again.
Portraits of promises feigning flutters of hope
I have a collection of things that you love
Or loved
You say we’re strangers now, but if I close my eyes and hold real still
I can still feel the flutter of your heart under my palm, so innocent against your chiseled chest
Each beat filling the rhythm of the melody of saving you from yourself
Those sweet summer nights drawing dew
So at home in the drum of your pulse
The spine of Salinger turned over in our palms as you told me
That these stories changed your life
I read them cover to cover
Lingered in each word
For the mere fact that your eyes owned this prose
I read them cover to cover
To show you how your life changed my story
Your stories are still my favorites
The ones you told me in a hushed voice and those we told together, our hopes and hearts singing midnight hymns
I read them in the corners of my mind where my heart won't hear and allow abandoned hopes to wreak havoc
There are other stories
A box of photographs
A reel of black and white film
Lost laughter settling in the booming silence of my ear drums--
I miss you.
Do you remember that night we laid on the dock, counting shooting stars?
Twenty-two.
I counted twenty-two, my lucky number
I dreamt they could fall to kiss our foreheads and maybe give me reason to remember you loved me
No matter how far inside yourself you hid
I could still crawl through the crook of the old willow tree
Climb in and wrap myself up tight
It was the only way I would fit.
I miss you.
Sometimes I sit here and wait for you
Our old wooden foot bridge
Our peak of the mountain
Where you were Jack holding my arms outspread
And if you jumped I jumped too
I still collect pennies of you
When I find them upside-down, as I find they always are
I turn them over
So that perhaps when I walk by the next time
I can follow my Hansel and Gretel trail of lucky copper sunbeams
Know that even after all of our stories
Have realized they are that and nothing more,
You still send me light too