What a wonderful thing:
enough time face-to-face
to know the curve of your eyes.
Enough space: larynx vibrating diatomic air
to cochlear-hair receptors;
communicating how, when, where, why.
More smiling in a day than I’d seen from you
across a desk, across years.
It can be a terror to be known; it can be a pleasure.
I can feel like a mess most of the time.
I did not, that day, with you
(I worry I seemed that way, still).
I worry too much.
I don’t worry enough.
I worry about the wrong things.
I don’t want to let the world in,
I don’t want to invite the future,
in all of its possibility;
I want you to be my world
for right now, in this moment;
I only want to know what Is.
Let us take off our shoes,
walk into the woods, breathe in
petrichor, evergreen, goldenrod.
Please don’t go.
Don’t run and hide
if I am sad, or angry—
those feelings will never be rooted in you.
Please stay, here,
with me in the green.
To someday see our faces
together, adjacent,
tangent in a tin mirror—
darling, that would be a dream.
