A Long Time Coming

You sway the grassiest ripples of my heart 

soft, pliant, cast with a sheen 

heat the top of my head like a disc of sunlight

I've always wondered what it's like to love and be loved in return.

(The ache of mystery has been resolved.)

Catching a glimpse of your dusky skin is like seeing 

light glancing over inked text 

Falling for you is like wondering what's it's like to fall from air, from the window of an aeroplane 

There's the clench of the stomach, but an absence of true throat-squeezing fear.

Losing you to time--that enveloping, oozing entity--is like the dissipation of ideas 

Helpless to stop it, I can only hope to grasp 
a few of the remaining, drifting, flaxen strands, 

all the while watching the rest fade to forgotten nothing.

When I was younger I tried to make patterns out of velour carpeting, futilely lifting 

my own stories out of embossed fabric.

Now I trace lacy designs on the sinewy, raised canvas of your palms 

your face, your angled shoulders 

Lost, in the plains and ridges

I paint.