What an unexpected calm in this minefield city
Shrapnel memories settled
Long enough to realize
It’s been months
Since I wished I were someone else
What unexpected weightlessness in this moment
Sirens fading eastward
Slow enough to realize
I didn’t know
They were there
Until they left
I want to swim here
for a long, long time
I want to get all pruney in this love
I want to swallow too much water
and see my bloated belly later
I want to blow this love through a noodle
high in the air like an elephant
so it backwashes back on me
I want all my limbs to tire
as i tread and tread and tread
and someone sends me a floaty
I want to stay in this goddamn water
There's no where else I feel this weightless.
You wrap me in cedar
To keep the moths from chewing holes in my wooly heart
The smell of it all safety and adventure
A steamer trunk at sea
In a place so alone your teeth are all stars
You are moonlight smiling on calm waters
And currents that control the weather
I’m not making plans
But I’m fixing to lean back like a deadman
And see where this tide drops me
It was a long time watching you lose your language
So gradual that I couldn’t have warned you
That you were forgetting
The key words
The magic words
The abracadabra you came to me
knowing
The secret code you told me, the one that opened me
Yes, it was a long time watching you unmoor
Floating away from nights laughing on the floor
I don’t remember the joke
Or even talking to you at all anymore
It all became reminding
It was my recitation
A mass all in Latin
An offering up instead of communion
But I remember it like a hymn
I remember it was beautiful and it helped me fall asleep
And I remember the headlines
The forevers and the dreamlines and the motherhood
And I wonder now what I would have heard
If I hadn’t already decided then
That I understood
The words you were choosing
While every day you were losing your language or
While I was never learning what you meant to say