Whispers in the Wind

Don’t look at me as though the sky would splinter—sharp—and slice through your retinas, your irises, your optic nerve

If you stopped. I sit in your lap on the edge of the world    nothing below us but air, air that blushes a midsummer

Sunset, and moves in erotic dance around us. Two thousand feet below, a bundle of rocks eyes me with prescience, and I can’t help but grip you

Tighter, can’t help the whispering wind, a wind that flickers the image of you    calm    in wolf eyes and crocodile jaws. The

Rock beneath you    cold from the flirtations of the blushing wind    seeps into the underside of my thighs, for you and I are pressed close at the edge of the world, and there is nothing below us but

A    i    r

Compressed into     currents    clouds    and corners of rainbows, and it is all I can see, the air—

The air!

It abandons my lungs, my throat, my bones    the air!    it roils my hair and races my breath in unending coil    the air

Once gentle, once steady against my lips, once oh, so dear    (I am screaming)    strips my voice, blots me out from the memory of a

Newly splintered sky and you sharp against it, slicing my retinas, my irises, my optic nerve    stopped as I will stop at the end of the world.