Our story is a window.
Stroke by stroke
my body remembers that life
& cries for the missing parts of itself—
Cracked hands, dry tongue
Opening even on winter Sundays
As iced-over tulips into the flesh—
My legs want to lock, to merge
Into one muscle, I swear I know
Precisely how my cobwebs of cells
Would feel, sprawled in that reverie
Of found words & shoreline jogs,
What a backlash of longing
swoons from the sinew—
What beer undrunk, half-muttered prayers,
Barbecued ribs ungnawed,
bloated sailors in the sky.
How brittle the gloss of understanding.
Memory’s glass holds nothing but itself.
Its window watches me. Our oily prints
Stain its glass like a bruise.
A halo of breath will always be waiting,
Maybe inside, maybe outside.
This heart tilts & pitches its monotonous metronome
For our water-rimmed knees
Dangling over the dock, our obsessive eyes
Gazing into each other’s gaze,
Calibrating sunlight.
To be fed by sunlight,
Our bodies pearled
In blind feeling. If we went on forever
We would forever end.
We were the stars, we were translucent gills,
We were the silver tides
Sinking, the roaring shatter & gleam
Scaling along the luminous flamboyance
Of the bay’s body,
Lost like victory
Inside that enchanted Eden,
That consummate bitter bliss that made us part our lips to taste,
To relish falling against
The genesis
& finale of our own.
Image: Courting by the Window Grille, 1874, José Moreno Carbonero
