Because I Love You, An Elegy

for Emma Oliver

Because I Love You, An Elegy

Because I love you, and you are alive

I’ll write you an elegy you can hear.

It’s been Wednesday all day and all day

it’s felt like evening. No one has come to

flip the switch on every unlit street lamp.

Even cars are peaceful. People move

from restaurant to sidewalk to carpark

back home without a word. Geniuses

stay in their pillows. Dogs take the streets.

Today is the day for your hypotheses.

Today there’s a power of hope in the air.

Signs of sanity everywhere. Today, if a wind

kicked-up someone would lean on their elbow

and say, shh, be still. Because I love you

our struggles today broke like an algebra

of pigeons making obscure vectors up into

a falling sky, and I thought -- our last words

can’t be that color, as deep and scary as

the day’s final hours when the god’s change

guards and heaven is at its most fragile.

If this were my last glimpse of you, whatever

color I witnessed would erase from my eyes

from then on I’ll never see that color again.

My identity intact as the day that haze flew

from out my hands, the haze of such heavy arms

down my side all these marching days like

tree branches wanting to be cut. But, I feel

my tongue quenched just by saying your name.

So, tell me where you hid the joy I used to carry

in my side pocket. A small family of mice live

in my shirt back and they nibble at it every night.

In a hundred years a million hands couldn’t fashion

a single lifetime, and believe me I’ve tried.

In the city beneath our sheets it is midnight,

your legs the marble staircase of a landmark hotel.

I hesitate a moment to catch a handful of confetti

making its way midair beneath the unlit chandelier

of your bent knees. In my most palpable dreams

I am lost in the jungle collage of time, a cloudburst

full of grandfather clocks, my tears felt that antique.

The rivers of the world began to chime, so I drank

in the ticking, disregarding whole calendar years

in my concave memory. I became the coast

of my own shadow. Lavender neck, salt resin mind.

 

Where every flower took root a sundial bloomed.  

I see a couple walks by, the woman with a slight limp,

and for a second I am not alone in some of this.

I tilt the lampshade of my heart to see better,

But I’m wrong, and my sympathy flies too early.

She’s only stumbled in her heels, and together

they laugh at the missteps they’ve left behind. Genius.

How thick are the crease lines of unused smiles?

Because you give the hugs that accumulate like Karma.

When you enter any room and I feel like life

just cashed in all my life's good deeds. 

I want the ethos of a mountain-climber’s love: 

they know when you finally reach the summit 

you are only half way there.