Wrapped in these tender forms of
darkness, blanketed by the reassuring weight
of expectation and routine, the hours slip loose and easy
in the soft exultations of
your breath and your breath.
These are rhythms born of comfort and hidden wonder,
quickened by laughter that never knows
voice but ripples through you with a freedom
deeper than sky, flickering like forgotten stars,
a heartbeat wonder of air twinkling like sudden jewels and then
hushed
subsumed and
absorbed into that next moment, flickering liquid
quick and vivid and real and
once and forever and
gone
as the new hour chimes with steam stretching
wrought iron and a flood of warmth
that reaches out and across this gulf, this
chasm, this measureless space of time and distance
that separates you and with the relentless slow
twist and crawl of new earth rising from the
mantle
and pressing up and out, stretching into
jagged and heroic new ranges that may lie
in darkness, unseen and unexplored, but no less
real
I listen to you turn and you turn and
shift effortlessly into
this newer rhythm of continents drifting toward some
distant horizon these eyes may
never see.
I hear my own breath, frightened and grateful,
to have been delivered here, now, to this
somewhere in the night we pass.
