#gravity

Forget all that you knew about warming.
A red cardinal turning grey of a glass heart.
 
All you didn’t know of dancing on the moon.
Zooming in on a tree and opening to it.
Red wood. Red bird.
 
Pine roasted, you were grilling over an open flame.
You were swimming above a blue lake.
You were asking a friend what color of green her day was.
 
Forget all that I didn’t know of the patterns of stems,
that calling names is just another way of claiming the weight
 
of you, which is to say when I learn
your first word — light — I unlove
and love you right then, just to feel
it full again – this bird song, this green
house, this lemon pith of warmth.
Our own floating city.
 
Forget what month we devoured with citrus,
that fog can fill us too.
That in sleep, our bodies are just white tissue
contained within flutes of streetlight.
 
Forget the rules of gravity.
Forget locking the door.
 
This home is my home and yours.
We wake to burnt blood oranges,
coffee humming, un-shelling ourselves —
the new sun resting her lungs
on a deck of a hill house.
 
The moon caked in lemon peels,
hollowed cavities where we creviced into sleep,
inlets where we danced fog-bent and silly, made rainfall,
showered below open pines, gathered moonshells, seas,
patterned our breath, tangling,
untangling and tangling again into the glass nest we call
this warming, you call
this shade of sage, this waxing
love year, this unfastening of name song.
Nick, I say, it’s always warm again.  

But here we are — dissecting a pomelo
warmed by my car radio on Sunday and weekdays
of sitting by the west window watching us move
in rotation, disks among a sliding axis,
gravity now propping us against the counter top,
in the kitchen, admiring the thickness
of the pomelo skin. As if it’s waited so long to be unpeeled.
Grown swollen and fish-pink in longing. We pull it apart
cell by cell. I’ve never swallowed
poetry like this. These coral citrus segments could be light-moons
like hearts at the beginning of things — 8 moon flips
on Jupiter, says the radio, that night, the tides pulling
us under the lemon tree, twisting our names
into reoccurring rotation. You’re slicing me,
citrus moon. This is candy, yeah, like that.

You’re my perfect sky, sets me free

You know that I need you

You smile and it pulls me through

Whenever I feel far from home

Facing the world on my own

You are the calm in my storm

You are the light

You are the light that’s guiding me

The only one I see

The only one I need

You’re my gravity