thick air wanders around the room like the fingers of a
lover lost at sea.
this is not a long-distance plea. this is not my heartbeat
tapped out over telephone wires like primal morse code.
this is not a half-familiar dirge to the half-remembered.
is this the way it ends, i wonder, as the earth fills this
watery grave? polite smiles and the slow rot of my mumbled
oaths like rustily overgrown railroad tracks? we wane like
forgotten flowers, dissolve like oil and water.
i never forgot my dream: i turned to face down the rolling
hill of your street, to wrap our bodies tightly together
in red thread knotted at either end, to press us together
as the earth fell down. i turned to see you there,
and you were gone.
maybe someday you will know. maybe someday i will send you
every pen-scratch, every pressed flower, every song, in
perfumed envelopes incensed with my spirit.
it will not harbor guilt, nor strings, nor the begging voice
of a hungry ghost. simply you will own them to read,
simply to know, simply to have.
i see you: you are married then, content in your little house.
no matter how much i worry about it, your eyes will never change.
they will remain that haunting blue, penetrating and glorious.
and when you finally inherit the presence of mind
to put your head on my shoulder, perhaps then
this separation will sew close effortlessly.
-emma celeste, from lookedlikelaughing
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