And nothing will compare to that first love
unrequited, the way your heart aches
To reach out and touch her hair.
It falls like molten gold in the light
of a summer’s day in the Shakespeare
garden, you’re shaking with anticipation.
Laying in the grass, she leans over and
applies your lipstick with her finger.
Teenage adoration hangs in that lazy
afternoon, the cusp of fall, the first of
a thousand deaths.

a million lines make a window:
each suspended,
each digressing in the paleness
of space.

this distance from
you (a blotch of dark ink,
bits of pressed lead)
can never hurt more
than your expectation.

we're in your car and it
smells warm, solid.

you envelop me,
your eyes are pools of nightfall:
we're brushing shoulders—

time didn't stand still
even though i wanted it to.

I can talk to trees. The secret, you see, is listening. Go ahead, try it

sometime. Quiet your mind and focus on the rhythm of the world

around you. When you look for it, the heartbeat of the earth is very

easy to hear. Press your palms against the bark and focus on the way

the wind flows over and around everything, focus on the way the

grass and flowers push up to reach the sun, focus on the way the tree

breathes in the air around it. I can see the tree's memories of weather

and growth; the stillness reflects my own. If the tranquility was a

color, it would be the flush of a cheek coming in from the cold; if it

was a sound, it would be the lazy hum of a bee in summer; it if was a

scent, it would be sweet, like springtime flowers.

tears fall in wells of the irreplaceable
—their dying, solid currents
forgotten as i brush your sleeve.

it will outlast me:

this weathered floorboard, those lofty chandeliers...

i am everything you need:

anchored,
linear along this dais—

red, dying.