I LOVE THE WAY YOU WALK

after Eileen Pettycrew

Especially on the mountainside in the rain,
Straw hat tipped over eyebrows dark and slanting,
Your legs, long-boned and lean, stepping 
Without hesitation over cracks and crumbling earth. 
How you never pause at the fork in the trail, confident
Even as the atmospheric river tries to drown us.
I watch you and my heart is a purple lampranthus,
Bursting open under the sun. It doesn’t matter 
If deer are running for cover, splashing our legs 
With mud as they stream by, close enough to touch. 
Let us tip our faces to the storm gods, let the rain
carve us back into earth so I can follow your walk 
forever. 

OMISSION

Just for tonight, let me rest in this space,
this place                   between words

                and lines— 

that respite from speech
                                  where we breathe,

that quiet moment where the seed, wrapped in its husk, stays—
before reaching into the earth
                                                  to take hold.

I have spent years falling through these spaces—
watching eyes hang, 
                            suspended in light, 
                                                        waiting 
            for an answer—

listening to the silence of words left
                                                unsaid—

savoring the caesura of the sun’s last light 
                                                                  before it leaves the world—

waiting
                            for its return.  

Just for tonight, 
                            let me luxuriate in absence—

let my heart grow fonder 
                                      not in response to heady discourse,
or the tight press of your tongue against my skin—

but in the lull 

                                    before the intake of your breath,

the electric pulse that rises when your hand,

                  reaching through space
                                                        for my body,

                                      pauses. 

ONE BODY

Yesterday the rains came
and with them, emerald shoots
breaking through rusty soil. New
once more to this world—reborn

for a season. We paused along
the muddy path to watch them stretch
into the understory, small
against the redwoods’ vast reach—

belonging to this spot
as we belong to each other,
for a time. This is what it means
to be alive: to rise above

the safety of firm ground,
small against the heavens, knowing— 
no matter the shape of your life, 
there’s a place for you.