Unwound

I found your gray floating along the sand at the beach, inside a mottled crab shell beside an untouched pearl flecked with clingy ocean clay and I felt you as on old wool sweater, worn in with pockets of itchy resistance.  After that, I began to see you in other things– the gray between a salt and pepper buzzcut, in the shadow of lavender at dusk,  steel cut oats floating in a bubble bath,  ashes spread over freckled forearms, oh,  and smoky bergamot leaves in a flask grown cold. 

Your gray is days the skies was a dirty chalkboard  from erasing our practice haiku’s,  the bean shaped paws of a cat, broken typewriter keys lost in shag carpeting,  gray like the pencilled writing you swore was equivalent to a secret code,

it smells like rising bread, like ironed bed sheets, like one thousand rosemary candles,  tastes like the perfume of San Francisco fog or  tears you’ll cry after a campfire, your eyes squeezed shut like you’re praying for someone, sounds like loud sneezes from your pretend allergy to kiwis. 

The gray of the spoon you reused for salads at breakfast belongs to you too, a mountain growth spurting in rioting adolescence, intertwining and all consuming and touching paint smudged fingers to bruised cheeks.