The burning soul stretches out to the sky
Air thinner up here but so clear
Breathe in ice gasps and stars
A silent flame unseen from below
Devouring oxygen feathers uncertainty
Sun black weightless coal
In sheer blue silk underthings
White lace clouds peripheral vision
Unbothersome matter from this height
Overinflated -- perhaps
But how else to let go
Sometime before you and I were born
Before our continental ancestors were even conceived of
By their mother’s mothers
Who at the time were just little girls in prehistoric pinafores
Way back then
Someone fell in love for the first time
And they learned that that love means down is up
And dark is sharp
And sunrise means the end
In between the scramble of inventing crop rotation
Avoiding the plague
Minding the flock
And skinning rabbits for stew
One pair of eyes kept meeting another over an open fire
And since no one yet worried about particulate matter inhalation
Or the rising cost of premium daycare facilities
The human heart still had time to leap and swoon and twist itself into knots
Over that other pair of eyes
That were watching and waiting and seducing
Fixed on nothing but her
Nothing to click on
Nothing pending a reply
Back then people were just starting to understand the confusion of senses,
That meeting someone, not just anyone
can make you feel like you just breathed for the first time
Like you just sloughed off the amniotic fluid of singledom
You cry out in a gasp of inarticulate virility
And suddenly know
The definition of paradox
The agony of joy
The intimacy of separation
I knew I was falling in love with you when I didn’t look at my phone
Or even remember I owned one
From the minute I entered your apartment
until the minute I needed Google to get me home
Thoroughly captivated by our interaction
Utterly disinterested in the typically addictive fleeting digital stream
Realizing time after time
you were the only reality I wanted to be mine
In my bones’ marrow
where the secrets of romance are engraved by time into my matter
I felt my myself grow strong in your hands
And I saw all the contraptions and distractions of today grow small
In the presence of something undying and unyielding
Nothing was ever as beautiful
Not as the way you made me feel
But as the way I wanted to make you feel
Safe like my flock
Hot like my fire
Confused like the body in love
Like down is up
And dark is sharp
Like sundown is a wake-up call
And sunrise means the end
Until next time
And I prayed for a next time
In a time when I had forgotten how to pray
Somewhere awakened in my reptilian brain or in my genetic codex
A woman with strong shoulders and rough hands
was teaching me to feel you like she had felt him
Her love story lurching across millenia to tell me
that this distraction with you is called fate
That seeing the night as the brightest part of day is called passion
That wanting to follow you without knowing your destination is called loyalty
That wanting to give you myself until the bank of my life had a negative balance
Wasn’t just a sign of intense but passing infatuation
It was a rite of passage into the ranks of our progenitors
Who had also forgotten to keep a watch on their phone
Or flock
Or fire
And instead kept watch on each other
Inventing words for new sensations
Whispering prayers about forever into the silence
Writing into their bones the origin story of love
(2018)
