turnedaround:

The moment I met you

I wanted to build an instrument.

I wanted to learn a new language.

Almost immediately, I ached with empathy

Felt for every person in every room you’ve ever walked out of

All the beds you left unmade

The stories that couldn’t keep you reading

 

Before I was born,

My mother’s hands were patient and strong

Always on her stomach

She held me there, like Atlas held the whole wide World.

Before I was born,

She wrote me letters.

Most were her daydreams and future plans

Only one was an apology in advance for all the pain I would feel

The blood I would lose,

Her worry for whatever else might escape my body.

 

After I was born,

My father built our home here

Where the seasons change four times a year

And the weather will only ever compromise.

Perhaps my parents were preparing me for the feeling of you

Every time they made me return a book to the library

Look through a telescope

Or leave the bird’s nest alone

Now It’s a similar instinct, unnatural but learned,

That keeps me from touching you.

It’s every age of me

Every year of my lifetime

That struggles to love from a distance.

Not touching you when you are so close

Is like choosing silence over symphony

Or purposely sleeping in the window seat of an airplane

As it smooths over the valleys and the mountains

I have only slept beside you twice,

But it felt less like sleep and much more like waiting

My mind was muttering math equations.

My spine was writing poems.

I can only sleep when it’s quiet and my eyes are closed

But I would open mine every minute or so

Just in case you were awake

Or just to be sure of you.

 

I am sure, as the summer has shown me

That water and music are both beautiful things

But water muffles sound and warps wooden instruments

I am a pitcher of water

You are too full already for me to pour myself into.

I’ve seen what a flood can do to a happy village

I wonder if it’s obvious-

The way I’m groping the air that your shadow moves in

Attempting to trace your arms, to pin them down

Or to pick them up and keep.

You’re the shape of the doorway

That science and faith might finally share

You’re the notion of planets- I know that they are there.

I know there are moons in the daytime

And the sun still at night

You are quiet and bright,

But you move in circles too far from my hands

I am stretching,

I am swallowing hard.

 

As both a poet and a person,

I believe in understatement

That some beauty is ruined when you put your mouth to it

This is why some people will never meet one another.

This is why wonderful things are lost in the fire.

This is why memory forgets and leaves us behind.

This is why I haven’t told you.

Wow