The Opal

I think of you

My heart clenches

In the carousel of seconds it takes to form a moment, yet I managed to witness a lifetime

How did you come to be

A vowel, a constellation, a rhyme in my mind

Days are bare, unpainted walls

Thinking of you I find color

Music

Can’t imagine a world with only one of you in it

I want to breathe you in

Molecules and seconds

Making up days spent together, pieces of paper forming a page

Marbles inside the other

Flowers retaining pigment as they dry

Death and life, striding side by side

Dancing beneath raw bulb, open sky

The pulse in your throat the clench of your thigh

Sweetness in a certain, slow agony

Instrument run over temperate string

The cry of unseen things in the dark

Listen, listen, closer, I bend my head

You tell me everything in one pearlized glance

If there were a creature able to step from shell, made flesh

I think she’d be you, you with your untouchable countenance

The regal surity of your long sloping neckline

How cheek bones become canvas, become art, become song

Your thin chest against mine, just once, like a film played forward and backwards

I see the embrace, an ackwardness, then I’m wearing my best dress, nearly spent, bare feet on dirty street roads, because I wore heals to look like your fantasy and one broke clean in half

You can take things like that as omens

I’ll continue to believe where there are feelings, there are destinations

Electricity above us in the heavens, sprung to earth

Lines in sand, in skin, in the consoling sky at night

Across your sleeping skin, when I want you to dream like I

Building on fantasy, stories come fully real

Only in others lives it seems, you swim ever further away

Until a shadow, a mirage, just the sound of your escape

Sometimes you strangle the moment, with accident or heavy hand

Intensity not meant for now, should take its time to build

I gave you no time, in my world you had long been its center

A flower within flowers, mandala tattooed on the small of my back in purple, calling

I think of you

My heart clenches

In the carousel of seconds it takes to form a moment, yet I managed to witness a lifetime

Before the end there was a beginning, unsung, untested, disused, sythed baren

Leaving nothing in its scatter but wistfulness

Like a memory without basis, not existing, just as real

The feel of your reddened lips, goodbye, never touched, still here

In the unfolding of time, you flicker closer, then far, then in, then

Out

Like an Opal on my finger

Luminous, unforgettable, the night air charged with its curse.

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Girl of honey

You have been in my mind

A very long time

I wonder how long it takes

For a persistent, returning thought

To gain permanence

Some part of me, an echo of some part of you

Even if one way, even if you have no idea, even if I am one of many

There’s something lovely about how I feel about you

As if I alone can see the greater things that make you

As if I had power to reflect you out into the world

Give substance to the emotion of being enthralled

A smile you cannot describe, a neck as delicate as a flower stem

From those secret recesses, an unfurling of more

I’ll never share all I see, when you aren’t aware of being observed, thinking yourself invisible

Or how many times you make me wince

Just imagining

How it would be if you returned

Even a tenth

Even a fifth of what I feel

If you could see me and long to

Wipe that errant strand from my brow

Take my hands in yours until they warmed

Cold hands, warm heart

Your mittens clammy with frost and body heat, you stand apart needing nothing, least of all me

In my imagination, our roles reverse

It is your chest that swells

In my proximity

Your blood rushes to your cheeks

When I look up into your caramel eyes

Eyes that remind me of sunlight

Poured through honey

Disapproving lips I want to touch with my own

It physically hurts

To think of you like cross hatches made with sharp knife on skin once able to be without

I could draw out my longing to lay beside you

Trace lines I am unfamiliar with until I know them as destinations

I thrive when you enter my heart and set it alight

Is it ever too late? Is it ever no longer necessary?

To raise you above them all

To need to follow you where you go

In the silence of time, you blaze

With my ever sustaining regard

Never as simple as; just something about her (although there is JUST SOME THING ABOUT YOU)

Not as easy as; do not take a chance

Hesitation has thrown herself away in fits

Made this the hour, I do something

To show what I always felt

Watching you then and now

Years in-between, no time, no space

Desire will be the last to survive

The heart is certain

Even as dreams may doubt their endings

We swim, eyes fastened on shoreline

The outline of you emerging, full and complete

Against ever changing background, your cruelty

Just a defense, used forever

Until there is no need.

I wish I had been with you whilst you wandered around town alone in the rain today

I wish like

when we were girls

joined at the hip

possessing no cushion

to walk in your stead

same shoes, same size, different spread

yours narrow and delicate

mine bashed and mangled from running

we were used to walking alone in the rain

until we showed up for each other

I recall

how your neck always seemed long even as

neither of us are tall

perhaps the slope of your shoulders or the arch of your clavical

there are illusions and striations even in similars

this we discovered

you could roll a better joint in the dark

and I could stand on my hands and walk – unguided

the carnival rat and the singing mermaid

we grew up on French movies, smoking in the back seats

oblivious to the risk

of feeling everything

and now you are in another country, as am I

two foreign girls without roots trying to get by

I think of you as I think of my reflection and

if I had a sister, if I had a wife, if I had a child

all those emotions and more, embroiled in your fur

like the fox in the dawn

barking sharp and clear

I see you – a red flash – a dart of color against fog

thinking of all the songs we heard and made our own

you possess the key to my memories and my home

as if you were a bee, building a wax nest in a clarinet

you are 17 and your legs remind me of a colt

lean and muscled with no fat, you stand sharp against the ocean

spinning stories of Irish and Welsh, dreams in technicolor

something about your eyes

something in the way you fight without fighting

a strength beneath the quiet

like waves over waves over mouths

I cycled to your flat and we read feminist literature by candle light

those were the times when everything began

and now again we stop and start

clocks without hands without purpose

sometimes it feels like

there’s only the part where we wind and wind up

to no future

and then it begins over

the dance and the memories

unwinding like skirts of sand and ocean

I think of all the places you have seen without me

and how building a life apart we drift like sea weed

I don’t want to lose the link

the key, the way you fit in my heart like

a shell and I can

always hear the sound of waves

in your skirts as you bow your head

and we trip over ourselves to find

that moment of joy

among all the hurt

that’s how you know when you have

an imprint of someone else in your soul

carried on my back, in my chest

like a favorite toy or something deeper

a chant, a eulogy, a suspension of reality

that fusing of one with another over space and creation

when did it begin and when did it become

the stallegmite within me

with your hands encircled

I hear your voice as my own

sister, lover, mother, daughter, woman

the girl with sea in her eyes

I yearn for you

crossing places alone

walking streets without

my heart hurts to think

of us apart, separate, living despite

some of us should be together

I hear you say

yes

like she would say

like the song of songs

and you know, yes,

you have always

known

And how

Hear how the fox festoons dusk

With larkish bark the color of a young girls best pitch

And how

Bathed in sweat I consider mortalities strange lyre

The photos of parts of me transposed and caught in time

Nothing is real and all is magnified by the mind

As she weaves her dream about our smoky heads

Tiptoeing over slate roof tops like ballerina forced to cat burgle

In this sliver of reality I choose

To disguard any mantle of victimhood

In imperfect slices of myself I have survived

Nothing will tear me down, save the last licorice root before tree fall

I have played acquiescences tuneless keys long enough

This is what growing up feels like at any age

The acceptance, not all is well or right yet

If I look, I know my worth

I’ll not give it away to appease those who seek

Through their own brokenness, to strip me of waterproofing

Time is too drunk on her singularity

She is in the bare knotted tree branches

Bowing together in subjugate to winter’s breath

Fat cheeked children licking plum juice from woolen fingers

And though separate, we are in conversation from

The very moment of our meeting

I am talking to you and listening close

As river water hides stoop of cold

Dashing its relentless self across us all

Bound and sheltering

From chill? From ourselves? The secrets behind our eyes or

Those said things unwrapped and steaming on kitchen table

The fire changing light to ghosts

I hear three generations

The reflection of another casting

My own breakage

Gathered with bright leaves in sacks of deposed

Being told fear is a disease we let enter

Turn it out, rent out those rooms you no longer inhabit

Turning as I have, to you

The shining of your throat covered in words

I’ll not let loose

Waiting for you

At hungry waters edge

In any country in the world

In any language

You run ahead

Turning back

The half moon of your face

Drawing light

An infusion

Aching

And the unseen fox

I imagine her as you

Bold wordless vibrance

Full tail, muscular legs

The twitch of beauty

Stark against tarmac

Owning darkness

Ode to absentia

I have written enough about you to fill a slim volume

or maybe two ships

set sail for one of the countries you visit

sending me letters in the day, with marks and fingerprints from all around the world

they would smell

like you, even as that was impossible

and I prepared, as nobody ever can

for the day I would lose you

why not, you ask, appreciate the now, when you are here on earth?

I have, though, we have never spent our lives together or even entwined

I have been saying goodbye all these years

yet it will not be sufficient, it could never be enough

you are more of me, than myself

and I feel you inside even though you are not here now, and gone in the future

loving you has felt like continual loss and little gain

yet I do, more than anything else, for you are that kite, unmoored itself and got away

the thought that comes creeping up as you laugh, as if I had a twin, and yes, she was the one who grew in courage, living full in ways I knew only from books

you have the lifeline of twenty palms and though you could not be a mother, you have always inspired me, like the character from a favorite story

reaching near and never touching, someone marvelous and unable to approach

I live sometimes with my eyes seeing through yours

the waves of your life nearing but never reaching, shore

at some point there will be a day when you are not simply absent and not around the corner

but further then, impossible to mend, hands of time, spent longing

it may be my song to want and not receive, the beauty that is you, and your life as it cleaves

further away, until from a great distance I cannot distinquish, squinting until my eyes hurt and run

I would if I could, but I never have, and I won’t

it is the theatre of our lives to play out

my role is that of thirsty

yours to make ordinary seem

extrodinary

you are the giver of dreams

I shall always wish

for one more day where I see

your figure coming closer through the dusk

perhaps to stay a while, even if we do not touch

I long, in layers, not to lose, what I have, not.

The melancholy of her smile

The film

shows her opening the door

stepping out

thin ankles short skirt

she’s not young but she’s got youth

on tap and wisdom to match

she makes you fall to your knees

just because she looks a second too long

in your direction

even if you didn’t smooth down your hair

shave your legs, flash your eyes

she might glance your way

with that confidence and that fragility

an impossible combination

like she was built out of the refugees

of love

hurt lying like a lover in her eyes

pinpricks of suffering alluring in the way

she survives herself and the demons

dancing rosy around her

you like how she holds on and almost falls

the spindle of her spine

strongest are the small ones

you want to take her in your arms

switch on the radio and listen in the dark

she’ll dance beneath your skin

she’s a drug she’s not perfect she’s the one

who keeps you awake thinking

if you could just reach her

inhabit the melancholy of her smile

before she winked out like a song you hum

without knowing its name