For T
Where would I go when a touch of your breath
Makes me large as the universe—instantly?
With the suddenness of birds escaping
I could love
All the fear I'd created when I felt it
And could see
All the light I'd diminished by not looking inside it
And could laugh
At how hopeless life seemed when I couldn't forgive that fragment
of me I could see…
But all that's so small
In the face of the real:
The way we can float without spacecraft or raft,
How the galaxies wink with kind light as we pass,
With Lords of Light honor we’ve traveled this far
Through wormholes and sinkholes and firefly jars
To find each other's arms again,
And make believe that it's the first time—
An honor larger than some earthly prize,
Something pregnant with expectations:
To walk the hard, narrow, holy path
Which means to walk, simply, as one,
Dangling our toes in still pools,
Laughing how meat falls off bones,
Sharing our most delicious, inexpressible thoughts,
Debating Spinoza and top runway models,
Persuading corporations to serve us,
Keeping our secrets from the world’s empty guess,
Remembering, always remembering, how it felt
To search for you behind frosted glass, to know you just passed with the wind,
To feel again nothing but a clock and some straw,
Some scents and some pictures,
Artist renditions of what love might have looked like, to remind me
I wasn’t meant to find a home
But to wander the outskirts of the dangerous city
Honoring it with envy,
Sharing what my blood collected with the skies.
Instead, surprise, the Earth itself changed,
It all set to motion on the musical string
Of our back-and-forth dance, awkward and refined,
The leaning in and the pulling away,
With the one who follows knowing where it goes,
And the one who leads letting go of how the song ends.
I let you find a penny in the street
For every thought you've had for others,
You let me talk until I realize
How perfect everything already is…
For there's nothing I can't see as you,
The whole lipsmacking kahuna—
When I'm reading a book, I feel you're writing it;
When I walk in the woods, the birds sing with your voice;
The electric skies dance on the pin of your touch
Because everything just came into reach
When your hands and your waist and your heart did.
