Voyage

Here is what I might fall in love with:

You skirting the fault lines,

moving toward me with equal parts bravado and trepidation.

I’ve been watching you for a few minutes now, across the dark squirm of bodies and bass lines.

You have a beautiful smile and a stupid hat, and it’s difficult to look away.

When you stretch your hand out to take mine and ask the first question,

I know exactly why I came out tonight.

You floating with me across the floor, sailing,

a pirate ship given over to the dreamy sketches of the sculptor.

You let me cradle you against my body,

sending the red clay roots into the floor and directly through your heart chakra-

penetrating you, making you drop your sails and curve deeper

into our connection.

You across from me at the bar, laughing,

narrowing your honey-dark eyes over a glass of Bordeaux,

trying to guess my sign.

There’s still a flush of blood on your mouth

from the medium-rare steak. It’s all I can do not to lunge. But

you aren’t here for that – it’s the dance and the feeling that you hold, still in your long bones,

and so I quiet my pulse, and listen, with all of myself,

like I’ve never heard music before.

You naked for the first time in my apartment, lit by dozens of candles, breathtaking;

yes, naked not nude, but you’re still art, darling,

beautiful stranger. Naked because

it’s absolutely obscene of you to look this way in candlelight.

You taste like peppermint lip balm and snow and jungles in the middle of the night. Your tongue is preternaturally long, and

you have an involved explanation for it, but I see what I always did: you’re a jaguar and a serpent and a wild horse and I’m drawn inexorably to your scent and that talented, hot tongue.

Your hands in my hair as you braid it, your knees clasped comfortably on either side of me,

telling me the story of the girl who taught you how to braid hair. We’re both exhausted,

warm, shaken out of ourselves by the fire and quench of ecstasy.

We will fall asleep telling each other stories,

coiled language bursting from us both, pressurized and never enough,

I will love you for the rest of my life and never tire

of the way your tongue unspools these histories.

I’m lost to the feeling and I know it. I’ve seen you, now,

and there’s no going back.

This is the love that I’ve sought, without knowing how to name it:

this sharp endless sweetness, this song of

greed and selflessness simultaneously, this

hymn to the body to the great beyond,

to the hearth to the ocean and back out again.

The tides of you are singing to mine that we’ve

at last

come home, and who am I

to not listen to the wisdom of the tides,

to the close hush of being lost

and found?