And now I will write of you, my slate-eyed love. For the curls of wine on your tongue, on mine, the wires of freckles, pebbled paths of your young skin. I will close my eyes and there, beside me, belonging to a night of violet skirts and penciled portraits, of spins to castles trapped in clouds, of walled windowsills, of the tooth I love the most, I will have your head heavy on my pillow, wet eyes, willowy wanting, quiet curls your curtains to push back.
I will close my eyes and we will reflect what has not been easy but brought by bargain with our slippery selves, Irish musicians falling faster. Our plastic cups stained pink or tangerine, our tongues all wanting, our eventual melding in the wake of mint tea and too many cheek-kisses goodnight.
Your thumping heart, of course.
I know this as our non-fiction rendition, fraught with life, that lived, livid experience that has broken both our hearts.
Having faced a devil, not ruby, but raw in the quickest of kidnappings, that opening to other worlds or other, dimmer, skies.
Then and now I am calmed by the still-present scent of you, so safe in the softness your skin, your mouth, your hands aligned on the fleshy cheeks that mark me home.
I imagine you and the silver-skinned fish above your mouth, your hand catching my sleeping head, our bright white beers, small parts of me in you: suckling lemons and jugs of coffee, couched creases of witches, white chocolate renditions and the flattening of pretense in loving, but never needing, fine wines and blankets, the softest, most forgiving lines of life.
If I were home, it would be an overcoming, like those southern melodies that gave my ancestors might, and beyond that mountain of mine, a falling, finicky, full flailing into love. And for you, maybe, it would be found in the achy tones, those bold bellows of women, show singers selling truth in throaty tears.
You and your lashes, your toes. Your spots, the markings that construe your past. Or the shared smiling eyes laid down, those whiskers having never pierced my skin.
I will write of you to make you real, to bring you back beside me, all licks of licorice and the custard cravings of your tongue. I will write of you to delay the aching, biting, to stare back at these familiar rains when you are hours, miles, skies away.
