We're almost touching.
we were walking side by side,
you're talking about cabs in your hometown.
I can feel the gravity of your hand, calling my fingers
whispering "it's alright."

We're touching but not quite.
you held my shoulder to protect me from the passing cars.
and for the first time in a long while, I felt so fragile.
In this world where I find it hard even to breathe,
you believed me.

I almost said it.
All I need is one ounce of strength to tell you every single thing that I have ever felt about you.

I want to find home in your collarbones.
Would you be kind enough to let a stranger in?
I want to seep in your being because I'm cold.
The world is harsh and my cracks are aching.

Almost.

but eventually, all the metaphors fall apart
and come to nothing
like paper dissolving in water
fanciful words dissolving with it
and without romanticized phrases
and rose-tinted writings
there is only unembellished truth

Still hexed, unemployed, another daylong bout
between too much silence and too much noise,
a sweetness opens the hymnal: sing, rejoice.

And I'm an American male child, born in 1990.
Summon me a moment, Effexor one-fifty,
instant nostalgia, a natural reaction.

Polly Anna, hailing from Tulsa, has a key.
She's in my robe, dancing on the balcony.
And we're not drinking
as much as we used to be, yet talking
baby names by three.

And I can feel it, a future good memory
unfolding in real time. Her dark shape,
growing darker, shadows from bedroom
to bathroom and back again.

Oh, the profane things we whisper
to get ourselves out of character,
unguarded, empty-headed, free.

The notes of trained movement,
of calibrated ****** phrase, harmonize.
The walls, the lamp, the bedside table,
the mattress, the blankets—the room entire
converges.

My name takes on two more syllables.
Her name becomes soundless.
Hold time. Bend, baby. Boundless.

let it take its time.
let it drift down the river
from the top of the mountain
where it was closest to God
let it be touched by the hand
that crafted your soul
only that hand knows exactly
where it will fit.

let it take its time.
let it waft into the room
like the smell of sun-soaked rose petals
and the perfume of the love
you lost but never truly
had in the first place
only that love knows exactly
where it will not fit.

let it take its time.
let it leave the room when you enter
because it is too shy to wave
in fear that it will remind you
of the waves that crashed
against your lonely body
only those waves know exactly
where it will withstand.

let it take its time.
let the blessing tap you on the nose
and then dart away
like a snowflake that does not turn
the lake to ice
the ice that you cracked and fell through
only that lake knows exactly
where it will not withstand.

let it take its time.
and when it arrives
let it in.
greet it like an old friend
even if you have never met.
let it stay.
give it a place in your hand
and hold it to your heart.

let it take its time.
it is on its way.

The golfers leave early --
September or October --
it's just you and the hickories,
the asters, the goldenrod --
and the reservoir --
the ripples shimmering eastward.
  
Steamshovels and bulldozers labored here one summer,
digging a hole for the water,
piling up the earth.
  
You walk on the bank they made,
seeing beyond the golf course --
the houses and barns,
the swampy gray-brown fields of goldenrod,
the railroad tracks,
the pines.
  
Your thoughts plunge to the reservoir's bottom
then turn
racing to the farthest field.