Rock, Dreams, Air
–for Scott
1.
The cliff in my throat teeters overhead,
wind and water etch away the consonants.
We walk through pure vowel, mockingbird.
Angel shale snaps like glottal stops.
Loose the wind from your feathers
like a thing searching for its word.
Kick a stone from the path. We’ll
follow it on an otherwise bloodless plain.
2.
I want to wreck our lives,
spill out of the lines,
run our colors together,
shale into schist,
I want everything with you.
I want to be terrified and austere.
Unfold the cloth from your chest,
make it our map. Anywhere
is what I want with you.
3.
I am sitting in the earth’s mouth;
you’re eating the horizon.
Stone swallows sun.
You are an outcrop, medusa’s lost hero,
erosive, craggy, a deathwish, a monument.
You, you would never turn to salt.
What is behind you is a smiling shadow,
a voice in a room not meant for speaking.
Break your neck to look at me.
4.
Let’s move into rock and be what rocks become,
tooth on your tongue, chalk in your hand, dust.
Let’s be nothing toward the ocean.
And then we’ll be the ocean.
5.
This poem is all precipice and gorge,
rim, switchback, edge, and sweat.
It says nothing
about a dimple of flesh
or the darkness of my body
which somehow contains my love for you.
6.
There’s something that lives below surfaces,
sometimes transparent,
sometimes blind with night or fog.
It has mood and electrical shape.
We descend into it and rise from it
nourished and absent-minded,
It speaks through our bones
and out our mouths.
It is our love.
We’re stranded in it,
swimming in it,
being held aloft by it.
It’s been here
waiting for us
all along.