some daily language

The tide line between, first, loving someone so that their sand becomes intermingled with your sand until there is only one shore, and second, keeping yourself whole and distinct, with an ocean inside that cannot be claimed or even sometimes shared with any other, the line between the two has just the transience of a tide. One wave demarcates a limitation that next the sun will evaporate or another wave will overcome. There is constant flux and variance and progression. One wave may stop short of the last even in a rising tide. Either we hesitate to bring another person into certain compartments of our lives, or else we find ourselves desperate for them and unable to have places content without their presence.

I don't know how to contentedly look at the mysterious places of another person, the places I have not been brought into, or given access to, as I say, the places where she "recurls from claiming my names."

I wrote this fairly cryptic poem in a moment of desperation about how we can not always claim another person, or be claimed, the way a flame cannot claim a breath without being extinguished, and the mysteries that each person harbors as a result.


THE WAY THE FLAME BENDS


The way the flame bends around my breath
you have not always seen.

I record inside the blur of world rising
as I submerge my limbs below the surface
of a bathwater, because I feel the pain and courage of activity, loss-- all
the things that make us turn I feel

so naked I hold it in.

Below the black of your river's
currents I have not often seen. How many bridge railings
I have looked from staring, I suppose I am still

only some man in certain ways to you.

Every place recurls
from claiming my names and the fragile sound
I call out over the field.

Please would you return to me with a voice.
Return silence on your lips to me that swallows
flame.

I would breath to you
a fire I keep. It is the one thing

when the trees shout about the wind
to the black passing of birds flying in gray
towards a forever south.
It is the one thing when the trees let go

their leaves like an autumn dress
in a pang. It is the other world that holds

its breath at the sight of it:
how I would kiss your accepting mouth.