In mesa-light I emptied myself
of the ache for you.
Like a net of stars across water
you had been what I could see
but not grasp. Now broken
wetly out of myth
into the faltering fragile howl of you,
I don’t know how to pray anymore
but to beg that midnight
keep coming, perpetual and hungry
for a quiet like caves, a canyon.
Sometimes nursing you to sleep,
a wolfish and private hum,
constellations discover us,
arc of a makeshift bed
where you wrestle and settle, rustle
and wing, our oblique pose
arranged before a window’s
small theater, the curtain pulled back
just so on harvest night
when the blue milk pacifies
the copper moon slides up the sleeve
of glass, your lids weighted like coins.
Distance and intimacy, to hold them
at once in the brief dark
then feel the shadow
of their leaving and which
is more wrought, I cannot tell
though to your pint-sized breath
warm against me and almost every
thing these days, I say
stay stay stay.