Moon at Half Past Noon

The Tremor (The Unbidden Signal)

A page clean and white.
Then, a shake—a spot of ink spilled,
not by my hand.

The air smells like rain.
(Who left the window open?)

A soft string breaks:
Thin veil on cold water—
the world is now washed off in ripples.

An uncertain quiver,
not asked for.
Before the word,
before the idea:
Just a deep feeling.

The Symmetry

I trace the shape of your quick laugh,
The sun that shines on the last word you speak.
I set the dark of your quiet thought Just right,
to make your bright face look more deep.
Your good sides, seen in light and shadow play,
Form a nice picture, a theme I can look at,
Where the dark is only frame, made to show the day,
The strong reason for my need to collect that.

So, I pick out the pieces that fit well,
The smooth wood of times, warm and soft to touch,
To make your balance with my own to tell,
A good, sound reason for feeling so much.
A soul picked well, in balance and in fight,
A first look at a coming life’s bright light.

Surrender Burns

Your name is a color I can smell—red and crushed mint.
The sound of your heart is a thick, gold rope
I climb, unable to see.
We are not two.
We are a storm system.
A language of heat. A list of nerve-ends.
The rub of your voice on rough silk skin.
The pen, now a quake tool, shakes, writes without my choice.
Quick, wild fire on the page.
Taste becomes feel.
Sound turns into a bright flash.
Every clear map is now fuel.
Washing away is a warm place, a good oven.
(Burn the museum. The maps are useless here.)

The Erosion (The Dawn of the Real)

This is the shape of you I did not make: the hard rock of your silence. This is the wind that wears my sure things down to smooth, unknown shapes. We are no longer a fire. We are two different land types, leaning. The rain-wet stone of your mood, rough against the cloth of what I thought. The break in your thinking—a gap I must now walk around, not fill. It is the needed clumsiness of your real face, unable to be picked or burned. This beauty of things not perfect: broken, short-lived, and full. And in the green moss that grows in the shade between us, a different, quiet green, a life made from the truth of being apart.

The Resonance

We are not a story that ends.
We are the low ground the story is set in.
The same weather has shaped our hillsides for years.
Our roots are now one root, deep in the dark,
drinking from the same source, rich black earth and bone.

This love is not a fire to look at, but the base
We build the house upon.
It is the weight Of old wood, strong and not moving,
A picture drawn in time, not feeling.
It is the shared talk of small sounds,
The natural turn toward the light we both share.

Ask me no longer what love feels like.
Ask me what ground feels like.
It feels like this. It has always felt like this.