I don't promise to drive away your doubts.


I don't promise to drive away your doubts as if
they were shadows and I am the sun rising up out
of your darkness, I cannot erase past lovers or touch
you the way they did because I have never loved someone
beneath the covers, in amber rooms that smell like vanilla and
chicory, I've never took hold of someone and felt there,  as
if the moment had been preluded by most everything in my life
we both and breathe and--

I would like to tell you that my love will be outspoken, but it will always be a whisper. A warm breeze that catches the hem of your
shirt and cools the sweat on your back, the soft remnants of a song--
the curious sounds that turn into music in the middle of the night
when the buzz of a hot summer sounds more like a choir, an undulating melody straying through the screen as if it never
meant to find you but it did, love did.

That I will not chase your fears to the absolute ends but approach them
slowly as wounded people, take their arthritic hands and speak softly to them, never recoiling from the faces of your past. Kiss your bruises and lay them out on the porch, every smattering of blue and moss green growing pansies in the garden--

  When you tell me  your secrets I will wrap them in lace and tell you mine, I will unbutton every layer of every girl i've ever been and show you the list of scars, the tick marks on these ribs where I once was captive in my own body,

I will not pick across your fields and uproot your flaws, I will sit beneath the trees you grew out of sheer anger and coax flowers to grow--Because your mistakes are not things to get rid of, only waxy residue I rub from the leaves with my thumbs, a better part of you that has always been there--that I'll move from the shelves and place on the dining room table, not for me to polish but for you to see--

That you are beautiful. That you refract the daylight just by shifting your head. That even when you are tearing into yourself in vicious rages, you will still be fringed in a splendid brilliance--

I will not take you by force, you are not an expedition, I am not a missionary. I will always ask, always from a distance. So hushed
and subdued,
for you.