I want to write you something like the bend 

of light in our room in the morning, the smell 

of your clothes after work, your rough clean hands. 

Like the sun fracturing so red through your car’s

back window driving home from the beach, winding 

Florida highway over low water like a road in a dream 

and you, drenched in golden hour, shoulder blade 

freckles like starmatter, your accidental muscles 

dappling and your dark green voice 

saying how you love the ocean 

but not like our room and home meaning to arrive

at each other’s bodies and finally lay down, 

hair harsh with salt, the unmade sheets 

like a foam-roiled wave receding 

silver-thin from the shore, and all of this blinding me. 

But I’ll probably only begin to know 

how to write about you when we’re already over. 

We have each left so many selves behind to get here. 

I’m not foolish enough anymore to think this shedding 

ever stops. It is easier for me to bring us to the dmt 

smoked on a fire escape in pouring thunder when I was 19 

and the rainbow sandstorm of musical symmetry 

that followed, than to explain you looking at me 

from the doorway of the kitchen. Easier to show 

the spiderweb bedecked in suburban rain those summers 

of my hounding neurosis, my mother called the cops 

on me every night, than to write anything like a vow

or your name. Instead, let me show the northern lights:

how you lay on your back over a frozen lake in Alaska 

before we ever met, you said it looked 

like the silhouettes of huge strangers 

passing before a gossamer neon curtain.

My tongue stupidly believes the roof of your mouth 

is larger than that sky. But maybe the body of my now

and the body of your now, when we have flown them 

and they fall away behind us like husks, will hitch together 

the way the cicada shells we saw clung to the trees,

those small ornately-decorated emptinesses. And maybe 

the memory of that day on the beach, how the two 

of them walked far away from everyone, the wind 

so loud in their ears, how she stood with her arms crossed 

in a hoodie and just bottoms and he cracked the beers with his keys. 

Maybe it will all remain in the consciousness of the dirt. 

The way you cannot feel the planet turn or tilt but suddenly a day 

or month is over—I lay watching you in the morning

as we change imperceptibly

out of ourselves. My father 

once told me love is a mountain 

some part of you climbs and never descends. 

Did he mean that you’re less after? Or by being divided

much more? God is merciless 

in her dispensing of beauty but somehow, we endure.