Solemnly Swear

Daisy dreams in the wide palmed plains

Bright-eyed lullabies

Drenched in some orphaned sun

Find me waiting for you

Holding my heart across my chest

Beating

Beating

Grounded

Do you know why, the leaves tip-toeing across the sidewalk square know your name?

I’ll tell you now, you’ve never met.

I think that they heard

I think that they heard,

When I politely asked the world to stop spinning.

Just so for a moment

We could turn ourselves back around

Grasp our hands together

Look up and tell the stars, “I’m ready.”

The leaves know your name because the trees speak silence in the same language as us.

I don’t know how to ask you

If you are afraid, that when the world starts spinning again…

We may just float away?

I won’t let you float away.

I will dig my heels into the soil beneath our souls

I will tie the big dipper around my waist and anchor it to the trunks of the trees

I will tell gravity to stop panicking and just let go

Gather the constellations and planets

On the tail end of an inhalation

Allow the breadth of the galaxies to rise with the lungs of a sleeping dreamer's chest,

Just breathe.

Wildflower Whispers

I paused mid-kiss
To look you in the eyes
You asked me what,
But you knew what.

You knew that somewhere…

A star had imploded
Mountains had moved
A first breath had been taken
The earth had shaken
A tree had fallen and made no sound
Birds had sung hymns
The wind had blown whispers of wildflowers
Soft as your fingertips tracing my arm
You knew
That somewhere in the infinity of your irises
Implausibly intricate
Strands of dawn-dewy webs
Were being woven
Between your soul and mine

But all you could manage was
“What?”

And all I could do was smile.

Freckles

We have a lot of hiding places,
A lot of secrets speckling the backs of our hands.
My sunshine calls them freckles,
I just call them you.

Glass

Did you know

When your heart felt filled

That it could be full?

You ask how I know…

I know because I knew,

And here you are.

Interlude

I’ve caught so many snowflakes on my tongue walking home

A galaxy of lucky stars would hold a thimble of this love

My eyelashes are dream catchers tonight

You darling, the dream.

Aubade

When night light filled my tired eyes

The moon was not who shone

My luna,

Her sweet celestial subtlety

Only a kindhearted dove to carry here

Such impossible incandescence

As richly poured from distant warmth

The kin of humble heaven’s sparkle

I so often wished upon

In the indelible elegance of pastel dawn,

Too bright to meet my longing gaze

Let me live in eclipse forevermore

For all along,

Nursery rhyme yearnings for hopeful home

Were withered upon gauche glimmers

Feigning grace

You, my sweet love

You,

Were my dusk-cloaked star.

Soil

I wish our years were wooden

That I could set each morning coffee ring

Within tomorrow’s

Until I could wrap my arms around the trunk

Of a great, breathing red oak tree

I would let our laughter live as leaves

Our hope hang down on molasses vines

Etch our fears into hollow roots

Days become memories

Cradled concentrically

We could sprint through our growing lives

Forest sprites drunk on sunshine air

We should never know how old we were

Bark shading soft secrets,

These woods would remain

Long after we’d gone.

Attic Song

When you lose your voice

To the sea salt drying in your hair

Turn your palms towards pastel haze

Exhale longing for words that won’t come

Your song found itself somewhere

Between lost and in-between

Echoes that never sound quite the same

As words tumbled from beeswax lips

Funny how the fractures

You fought with might and malice

Grow now soft as tangled roots

Beneath sea salt tracks down petal cheeks

Sit here and cradle your caution

Sing, little meadow flower

Hold the soil of courage

The trickle of star-shine in your veins

Where sleepy Sundays collect in the eaves

Celebrate silence with me in azure light.

Sailor

That light traveled thousands of years to meet me

I whispered to your sleeping self

Your breath replied in metered sensibility

In time with your sea-bound heart

I’d like to be a harvest light

The moon in the moonshine

I’ll be the moon

Who shines for you.

Coordinates

By the song of satin plains

Pinking in the Westward sky

My rose-colored windows

Face the same sky as you

Believe me when I say

And take trust as truth

Home is just where we’re headed

And right where we are

I want the crook of your spine

Like the bend of the oak

Over lilies and lampposts

Who can't outshine your stars

Bare feet on silvered pine

Sing me through your shadow

Cradle light in cupped palms

Knowing this one is for you.

Skyscraper

When freckled light blooms from city streets

We cling to one another

I cannot separate your exhalation

From the delicate air I breathe.

Compass Rose

I wrote you a letter with the first breath I took

I’ve written you every moment since

Your name has steadfast sat on the tip of my tongue

But darling, while for so long words escaped

Your half-moon heart I know so well

For my star shines from the other side

Celestial marvels apart

But oh sweet love,

Together we are full

I took my patiently longing letters and sent them

Beseeching each stranger, stop light and song to be my postmen

I prayed that the conversations between our searching souls could rise to paint the sky–so that the stars might mirror your freckles, the moonlight the glow in my eyes

Our perfect haze of what will be

Heaven drew maps on our palms

So that each time we sat with our head in our hands

We could trace the paths worn into our calloused skin

To see how much closer we’d come

To sharing no more paper words

Besides the Times between us

On sleepy Sundays

I didn’t know my map was torn in two

That when the path seemed most to come to a solemn stop

You would reach out to shake my atlas palms, my compass heart

Repeat words I’d say for decades to come after long days

Hello, my love. It’s so good to be home.

We have our own language, you and I

When the two of us talk with our hands

I read the braille of your goose bumps

My fingertips sing to your sideways smile

As my skin memorizes moments

That age will one day forget into silken shadow

Take my hand and we’ll walk

Tell me your mother’s favorite flower and your father’s favorite book

I’d like to know how many widths of my pinky finger

Fit in the spaces of your spine

The capacity of your lungs when full

And the moments that make you breathe that deeply

Grand views or the Old Italian woman’s laughter making the inbound bus fly

Is there a way to quantify exactly how much envy the Milky Way pours into your irises?

You wear fear patched on your sleeve and you’ve stitched it so tight

It will require a lot of adventures, storms, stories, sun and stumbles for it to fray

But that cocktail is by large my favorite sandpaper

I will wear a ferocious brand of domesticity

I will care so hard it blisters my soul; knowing full well callouses make it hard to call me “pretty”

The first time I saw you

I swear in the indelible elegance of our irises igniting

I didn’t fall in love–love fell through me

I want to wear that love on so much more than my ring finger

Tattoo your sunsets on my rib cage

So that I can jump-start dawn with each beat of my heart

I want to wear your love on my pinkies

So you can laugh at feigned propriety when I sip wine at the bistro downtown

Don’t be my umbrella

Be the forgetfulness and the whisper in my ear when it rains

Teaching trust that the sun will come

Be the sun when it comes

I want to wear your love in my laughter.

When I taste those iridescent words,

I mean that I want to promise you poetry and tree bark and starry skies and nights asleep in our little home

When I say I love you, I mean that I promise…

I promise to spend every moment of the rest of my life loving you

And when those moments float away like firefly embers into the night

I promise to take your hand and step into entropy

To choose one of those evanescent pinpricks and learn to exist as light

I promise to never give up

To never grow complacent

To spend every day learning how to love you even better

Because of that

I promise to love you courageously

I want to love you in a world of little things

Bottles of wine on Tuesdays

Breakfast in bed

Mountain drives

And kisses you never saw coming

I promise to always be kind to you

I will not call you anything that is not love

I will not let anger run in my veins

I will be honest

I will be soft

I promise to set butterflies free in my chest each time you walk through the door after work

To hold your hand when you’re scared and your heart when it’s heavy

Let these words be a promise—not because there will be moments where we can’t remember

But because I want you to be able to hold in your hands the overflow of joy we pour into one another’s worlds.

Keys

The answer we both hold locked in our hearts. The truth that must never be uttered until perhaps that day, when we meet in a coffee shop along some drawling avenue in some drizzly city.