A Sky That Does Not Bleed

written as an exercise for Casa los Altos poetry club; theme "a look." Inspired partly by Amanda Palmer's fabulous song "Machete."

A picture holds the information

of 1000 words, and a look

can convey a million more.

What do I do with 3 lifetimes

of mixed messages and missed

opportunities to connect to you?

 

Those eyes of yours.

With one look, you free me

and enslave me, at the same time.

I climb the tallest tree

in your city to dive into my own

wetness and the rolling damp fog

that embraces our cathedrals

on quiet Sunday mornings;

 

all those days I awake without you,

wanting your arms but settling

for the memory of that look

and then going for a swim

in the clouds instead. Can you not see

in my own gaze at you,

how my philosophy’s inhibitions

are seduced into your bed

with the caress of your eyes,

when they tell me the language

 

of wood and brick and metal,

turned to swan down; when they

say, “I always needed you to help

me find me?”

 

Because there is that other look;

your approbation: if I stand

one centimeter too close to you

where the wrong woman

or her friends or yours; might see you

looking at me. It is the look that

tears me out of the sky and dashes

me helpless to the ground, erases me

into the background of clouds.

 

You leave me to fly or fall

without you; that look says all that

needs to be expressed:

“I don’t need you here to love me,”

or “I have someone better to hold me

on Sunday mornings;” it is when I

am at my loneliest that my sunlight

bleeds into the tallest waterfall

of my memories with you,

and you say, “stop making something

out of nothing, just do as I say and

it will all work out,” but I was never

a woman to take someone else’s

magic at face value. I needed to invent

my own language to love you.

 

And I watch. I watch strangers

falling in love over coffee

and in crowded bus seats; I watch

how you greet an old friend, when

that incredible light in you

burns away so much fog to find

sunlight that does not bleed

 

And then I knew. The only thing

of substance in this landscape

of untamed things, the truth

of polar opposites and mixed

messages and connections that

still can be made: I need for you,

to look at me like that, too.

 

 

 

Author's Note

picture is my own, a church in the mist in our city