a poem

 

To be in love with him is to drift, to swim in the crust of the sea, 

the space where the sunlight shines and you are weightless. 

To twist in circles around his body, like a great vine, swallowing, wreathing.

No malice, no purpose, simply because he is there and I am here and we love. 

It is to sink and hold him. 

To be dry and pristine and sit on the earth in the vanishing daylight. 

To feel his every hair billowing, to see him as an organism like me. 

We sit in the breeze and know that it is also us. 

We fly in the breeze. 

We drift together in the wind as it passes through our hair, 

over our heads, caressing us. 

We sit on the horizon and we look at it. 

We set with the sun and sink below the earth and the soil envelops our bodies. 

We fall slowly into the soft underbelly of the planet, 

heavily to the warmth of the core. 

So he and I may melt and join our essences. 

The earth may weld our bodies, transcend and unfurl our life to the open air. 

To love me is to place his hand forward towards me through space, 

and for a moment we know we exist because we see each other, 

because we touch each other. 

Because the wind bristling in my ears is so gentle, 

and I can feel his hand on my heart. 

He wants to know I am alive, and suddenly I do too. 

We spend our lives chasing heaven, but it is between us. 

It is the heat between his hand and the skin above my heart. 

It is the pulsing of my chest that affirms us both that we are living, 

and that we are beautiful, that we are creatures. 

Love is the sensation, 

the energy in the margin between our hands before they touch. 

We hold them there. 

It is like storm clouds sharing purple lightning. 

It is when the deep, forever-extending sky kisses the plains or the rolling hills. 

To love him is to know that I am real. 

I braid my hair with him. 

I can dissolve and he comes with me. 

It is to be a lonely sailboat on a gentle sea, 

sinking, falling willingly into weightless death. 

I feel more real, but time does not. 

To love him is to abandon the earth and everything I knew. 

He creates a new world for me each time we touch. 

Each time I feel him he loves me more deeply than space. 

Each time our eyes meet we show each other we are alive, 

and we are breathing to the same pulse. 

The heartbeat of the horrific, stellar, unknowable universe.