19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
XI: 2014, winter
The week before I left, i took his hand and said:
let me weigh your heart upon the scale of my snow.
If it is as light as feather, your heart is worth its transformation and trust.
If it is as heavy as a memory, your heart will drown us both as a brick plunging through water.
I held it carefully and waited.
and then I knew,
we took to the air.
And I could see all aloft, clean, clear and the world cleaved in two.
XII - XVI: 2015-2019
How to stitch words to the forgotten and unsayable:
petrichor, sequoias and sentences, our hearts supine,
the salvage and silentium cresting
and once there was a world only for us.
XVII: 2020
And then as I left, the world turned
and a fuse, somewhere, lit and spun its way toward me:
the light in the green room in which the both of us stood,
story to story, vowel to consonant, each to each,
the light in February slipping over us all like that long-ago eel's sway
making its way back to my grandmother's hope and away from us.
I was whole but the world was not
spinning, breathing away and gapping
the far-crossing seas and I was worried and we all lost
could I now wait for him
and I could remember for the calligraphy of life to flower, now gaping:
the world vaping and grasping for breath,
and so did we
just as my grandmother had waited for that eel sitting upon her red bucket, stanzas long ago
and in that waiting, fog and a plentitude of air:
though it was all still youth and we were still athirst, both,
we who had born from the stories, lost them
and I was losing him to the air
he had become of the sun.
