The pile of pine burned with ferocity
While fields of watermellon wore green in generosity

Jerimiah delivered rows of assiduous thoughts
Fertilized in decisions made years ago

Margaret was from Huntsville , working on a divinity degree
She was small , rode a bicycle , studying infinity
Timid , not unlike a titmouse in spring
Margaret had a sister named Judy

Jerimiah left for the mountains of Colorado
He took only his last name Johnson
He spent winters hibernating with the bears
He learned to have no fear and grew a long beard

Tennennessee is in Alabama , just south of Huntsville

A snowslide almost buried Jerimiah

Margaret moved to North Carolina
got married and that's all I know

Jerimiah made tracts in the snow . . . go
He sat above the devide looking down
Sometimes west when the sun went down
But mostly east under the full moon
Howling so forlornly the wolves cry

Margaret looks west every night
Then sheds one tear

There's a voice inside me that says I am home.
Like a watermelon or a sunflower.
Something natural and large.

There is also a voice that says I know nothing at all.
Not the smell of the sky
or the crunch of the dirt.
Instead, I am empty,
like a filter for air.
As though all passages have been opened;
No airway blocked.
As though the vents are fully opened
and I would let you walk through
if you wanted to.
But even so,
I do not know
what that would look like.

Your hair is pulled up in ringlets around your head
and I think I see you clearly
But then again,
Are you just an open vent as well?
And if so, what does that make the two of us?
What are we when the smells don't make sense anymore,
When the flower becomes unrooted from the ground?
What are we then?
What are we now?
Sometimes I think I know.
I feel like we are so many things
and yet all of it undefined.
I've never felt like there were so many possibilities existing at the same time.
And yet no label for any single one of them.

Your breathe reminds me to come back to the present
and I realize that the watermelon
is coming from the candle on the windowsill
the flower is a painting above your bed
and I am just a figure within it all.
A human with a heart and a mind
both open the way that a vent can be
both receptive the way that our senses can be
both bodies existing in a plane in which there is no reality clear enough for who we are.

I just wish there was one thing i was entirely sure of.
But then again,
Maybe there is.

The one thing I truly know for certain,
is that I miss us

when we

are gone.

Could I tell you, if I wanted to?
All that is going on inside.
In one corner is all that I wish to be.
All that you make me feel.
The scent of watermellon.
The feel of your hand flat on mine.
The smell of your shoulder.
I touch the blades of grass and I think of you.
I think I am crazy.
I think I am in love.
I think I am stupid.
I know not what I am.
Not truly.
Maybe because I don't know what you are.
Where you are.
You look at me,
In my eyes,
And I feel connected.
Peaceful.
But entirely alone as well.
As if I know you but don't know you in equal parts;
It's not a contradiction I enjoy carrying.
On the other side is life.
The one that keeps moving while I stop to contemplate.
While I stop to look at you.
While I stop to smell the watermelon and look at the greenery.
It keeps moving.
And I stay back.
I think I need to.
There is a part of me that is unresolved in you.
There is a part of me that needs to know you
And who I am within you.
But time is painful.
The clock points at you, taunting me,
Reminding me that I am slow,
A turtle in comparison to a lion.
I do not know what animal you are.
If you are one at all.
If we are compatible.
Or if I am the prey and you the predotor.
Or maybe, simply, two different species.
Appreciative of one another,
Living in cohesion but never fully present.
I think I know you.
But I also know nothing at all.
This is what it is to currently love you.