Who lives where summer
ends knows the hard cold of
autumn is blissfully
close, although it feels
each season newly un-
known. You are constantly
newly unknown to me,
my night-glowing open-hearted
sting-of-salt weather.
Rains and winds, sleights-of-
hand. Who if not you
could weigh me enough
down. You’d paint my eyes
blacker and warmer than they are
and soon they would carry
whole calendars of
black night in them.
You say you’re pulled back,
but it is a rare thing inside those
shocks of minutes that
holds without our even
needing to touch it.
Maybe you think you trade
one clean joy for
another. But mine is darker,
slanted, nitrous blue at the root,
an acrostic of what is
most free and
far. To be another
person than the one
you were before means
more than I understand.
But my gradual hands
move in streams
over you whether you travel or not,
as you drop into sleep or not,
and in the book of this
most-alone-place I am
there only when you feel
need, a coat so thin and so like
skin you can touch the
slopes, the smoother
pools, dust-mooded
winds over roads, the skeleton
instrument of your voice
as it richens the maps
and paths, summer’s last
shades of white on dark soil,
as if the moon-moth and
house-mouth were
close against the lashes
of your eyes, puzzles-in-
flutter, or wandering
off through the warm night air,
unlikely ever again to find
such light as this.
