Penelope
Looking at my body during the rain,
the leaves of green as wide and humid as
a second chance. Come back. Smell
my neck and my hair in the summer,
how hot and delirious it is to be as
the blackberries rolling along the
road. Be the terror of a dark tire,
be the firmness of the wind, be
the gnats that seek sooty undoing,
be a god of misuse. Touch my leg––
hold me. Make me the heat among
other heats, how bodies and cedar trees
smell in the backspit of July: a dying
that writhes like life. It’s been hard
wondering if something is mine
because I have it, or if something is mine
because I asked for it. It’s been hard because
I’m not sure which one you are. Or
what it could possibly mean that
I still have not yet met anyone else
with your relatively common name.
Always, I wonder who I would be
if I were not someone who waited,
who feasted on air, who elaborates
on nothing like how spiders weave
discontinuities of lace into the sky.
I remember so much how you were
with me, how it was a feast of the
small hours, how you let me wear
the thick socks from your dresser.
It’s been so long, but I have you
on me like a temperature, in me
like green water. To love for no
reason, or to love on little evidence:
it’s a tragedy. It’s a thousand nights
turning my face from the other faces.
It’s a long, cold disappointing moonlight;
an early morning imagining how you once
kissed my stomach like breathing into the
evening cold center of jasmine. But––
But it is also a triumph. This is the part
the poets have always gotten right.
It is also a triumph. Imagine how few
have ever loved at all, let alone
senselessly. And for so long.