These colours begin where your hand rests, slow and deliberate,
as though the burning light itself were learning how to touch.
I watch it spread ochre breathing into blue,
blue loosening into ash and milk until the wall no longer knows it was ever empty.
Your fingers smell of oil and rain,
of crushed leaves and ironed vanilla sun,
and when they graze my wrist a tremor of pigment wakes beneath my skin.
Love you know,
like paint does not arrive whole;
it stains, it seeps, it waits for the surface to surrender.
Ah you lean toward the canvas as if listening,
your silence thick with turpentine fumes and dusk.
The room fills with magnificent and radiant colour’s filled murmur,
the low sound of bristles dragging their prayers across linen,
a sound like wind combing oaks and pines or waves rehearsing their collapse.
I hear you breathing into the reds.
I hear the yellows warm
under your beating pulse.
The night presses its great roots against the window, and the moon anchors between two buildings like a nail driven into dark wood.
Touch follows sight the way fire follows breath.
My shoulder becomes a field where your palm leaves a pale streak, unfinished,
trembling intermittent
and real.
The paint is cold at first,
then alive,
then intimate,
as if it had always been waiting for a body to remember it.
My skin learns new colors.
My skin learns loss.
You mark me the way raging storms mark trees,
without cruelty,
without mercy, only necessity.
Each stroke says: remain. Each stroke says: depart.
The smell of this room deepens further oil, dust, damp evening,
the ghost of honeysuckle and Lily dew drifting in from some earlier hour of happiness.
My mouth tastes of rusted light and sweet plum, of sour wine made palletable
by your nearness.
When you kiss me,
colour moves between us like a secret animal,
leaving behind a sky blue that resounds,
a gold that aches.
Happiness bites.
It leaves teeth marks.
It leaves evidence and gentle bruises.
Outside, the wind clutters windows as it rehearses its old grief,
unmooring clouds, dragging silhouettes across the shaded street.
Inside,
the colours hold.
They cling the way I cling to you when the storm forgets its own name.
You are here.
You do not run away or shy to touch. You answer me with your hands,
with your wrists streaked in sunset
and coal.
Every day you play with the light of the universe,
and tonight you spill it on me.
Sight fractures the mind.
I see your eyes multiplied in wet reflections of stars,
smashed in the shallow pools of paint lids,
my own face undone and rebuilt in pigment.
I see love learning its shape through error.
I see the canvas watching us back, jealous,
patient perhaps even longing.
It knows what will remain when we are quiet.
Sound thins thick musty air.
Even the wind grows careful of itself. Only the brush speaks now,
its soft scraping like a bird freeing itself from sleep.
My name dissolves in you,
over and over.
Your name rises in smoke among the colours of love.
I remember you from before you existed,
when love was only then a rumor in the body,
a jar unopened, a figment of my unsorted imagination.
Now,
Taste returns in this silence,
like strong salt, mineral,
the faint bitterness of passion and lilac brushed
with the sweet taste of honey.
I lick the edge of your thumb and the colour transfers,
a soft vow swallowed,
a gentle vow kept.
My mouth becomes a harbor where your hands rest briefly
before leaving my lips again.
Ah painted love,
a fugitive and yet faithful.
You dry slowly.
You crack if rushed. You darken with time.
Even so, something sings in these beautiful layers.
Something survives the night’s erasures.
When morning comes,
pale and unsure,
the colours will still be there,
holding the shape of our having touched,
of our having been immense and immersed for hours in one another and of having filled everything.
And if later these wall forgets us,
if the paint flakes,
if the wind carries off our echoes to vast lands unknown,
still my body will remember the way this love moved through this night,
like colour across me,
how it learned my edges,
how it said without speaking:
you are mine, mine, and vanished into light of morning
once more.