I want to bottle your voice
and hold it close.
I’d keep an ounce in a locket;
A morsel around my neck,
to save the tension
of waiting
senses primed
for a worthy chorus,
drawing a clutch of notes
into birth.
My lullaby around my neck,
I could never fear the night
any more than I could fear
the dark brown of your eyes.
You would sing me to sleep
in fits and starts,
a note here,
a word there,
the formula of heaven.
You are the rhythm to which time dances,
slowly and deliberately,
with accentuated turns,
and smooth lines,
fingertips giving course to the wind.
Time follows where you lead,
the swathe of its skirts flowing behind,
your stage frozen.
Suspended in purgatory
I wait for your cigarette to end,
your conversation to culminate in its certain laughter,
the sound of your footsteps drawing closer,
the sound of rusted hands of the clock creaking into motion
after a hiatus too long to forgive.
The first thump of my heart dedicated to your hips as they pass,
the seconds ticking to their gentle sway,
the novel of my night dedicated to those hips…
Time leaves with you,
leaves without me.
I age too quickly,
lost in the minutes you steal with each second,
each sway,
each laugh.
I age too quickly without you.
Was it terrible,
this thing I did today?
Telling you every secret I’ve ever had,
(of which
you are three.)
Or,
more terrible still,
that it wasn’t you at all.
A stranger with your face,
pixelated into deception.
My secrets are mine to carry
Heavier by the day.
All these things I can’t control.
The phase of the moon,
the span of my hand,
the way you stand there,
forearm resting on the table,
one foot tapping the ground.
The way I flinch when you look my way,
a laugh which takes me by surprise,
the tremor in my hands
when you stand so close
and say my name.
The will of the leaves to fall,
and the rain to fall,
and my sanity to spiral away
and dissolve into the mist
of the words you sing.
In this strange intimacy,
less than my body’s length between us,
you step forward
and I lean in
and three feet becomes two
and I smell the smoke in your hair.
I breathe deeper, that it may bring us closer still.
That one breath of your air might find its way to me,
might enter my own lungs
and make its home in this decaying ruin.
My flesh will yield to a new fever,
transfused with the life it ought to know;
The pathogenic stillness in your steady brown eyes
taking me in both hands.
Showing me how this body ought to be used.
The quiet homecoming of a wren
to its empty nest.
The scratch of claw on twig,
a fallen leaf evicted,
a scrap of moss disturbed.
Much the same,
yet irrevocably changed:
There is no song for this feeling,
only brittle silence,
a warning
that this spell, too, might break,
like the smallest, aged twig
under clawed foot.
It takes many weaknesses
to make strength.
This silence, too, will break,
La Gatita Oscura 