lavender sky

(holy alone) holy (alone holy) alone

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.

I kiss you in a dream you and me as molasses, as girls six-feet-deep in willow tree leaves (under which I give my breath to your heartbeat and we laugh eternally), as lightning in my cheeks even when I wake. I kiss you from desert to that place where it does not rain. The sky will not break there, but here it is bleeding and there are two rainbows that I wish you could see. There is a storm that rattles the windows and reminds me of the shelter in your breastbone.

When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.

Say alone. Forty times. Pair it with the desert. Say it. Alone. Alone. Alone. Say the words plain, she says. Say it plain. Say it outright. Alone. Don’t get poetic. Say I. Say me. Say I am alone. Own it. I am alone.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.