Heidi and I

I won't pretend to know
what sad, slow days look like
through the semi-transparent blue
of your brown eyes, but I imagine
they grow up your spine in secrecy,
like vines from a very tall, very old tree,
as you flick fire ants off your loose roots.
There must be something I could say
about your swinging spectrum
that could enlighten the old man
that walks from my head to yours,
but when I use phrases like I understand
or I am listening, I have already abandoned
the beauty of your shouted silence, and I am
left to wonder whose voice it really is
that echoes back to me. If words could travel
along the taut line between our aluminum-can
telephones, it would vibrate like tantric chants
above this chaotic playground. What we share
is what the world keeps of us, and I won't pretend to know
what that will be in ten-thousand years, but right now
we are run-on sentences, comma after comma. There is no point that
stops our rolling river long enough to catch our breaths,
only little spaces for us to jump across as we try to collect thought
after thought after godforsaken thought. Our book reads right to left
but it is also angled toward the reader's heart, as if we are tumbling down a hill,
backwards, hitting the bottom, then sprinting back up to start over. If anyone cared
to pick us up, open us, read us, they would have to tilt their head in curiosity

and stare into us long enough to realize we are not meant to be read aloud.