2021
How the fourth dimension tastes
through fields of grass on the left-hand side of the highway,
always changing. When I come back home to her, she will sigh, she will turn to me, she will
dip her pinky beneath the hem of my shirt, and we will resume the good
work of finding ourselves in our dark kitchen, in the soggy
flow of the day to day. Later tonight, we will be smitten with the road and (if I become grandly
lucky) one another, following flashing yellow lines
into fingertips of the countryside, and back home again.
Hours ago, she woke up just to call me
incredible, and I (like always) am struck
just speechless, in awe of the universe and its warmth and the old
kerosene moonlight, that milk moonlight on her face
like nebulae, and when I catch her eye, her
mellow smile cracks open her whole face, and she glows, and again I find her
new under the folds of my old t-shirt.
Over these minutes, I am so close to her, I can feel her heartbeat—the ragged
pounding rhythm of time itself, a deep, dark blackness at its birth.
She is that queer silver crease in the sky—captivating, always changing,
giving softness to my strange rough gold edges.
She makes it easy to revel in being set aflame
and then somehow to feel as though I will never burn out.
Under a smeared sky of blue and indigo-violet,
I find myself comfortable with leaving my tired face in her hands
as she draws x’s in the cracks in my cheeks. I can feel our old
youth, sitting as decades among us, but here together,
we are in the mouth of zero, swinging on time’s chipped baby teeth.