Shaped By This Need

I.

I am trying to tell you how it is for us,
in a way that makes your soul sing
even as the mind fights it, I am speaking
of your soul as if it was a universe, a city,
the particular way you arrange your hands
and perhaps it is in them, your hands,
that the answer rests.When you asked me why
I would end my poems with a short note:
should you wish to read them,
it was your hands I was thinking of,
how different they are, how bound
to the process of shaping.
There is creation in your hands but mine
are so very small, are wind spent birds, fluttering
this way or that, stroking the beautiful but never
enough. They drown in the kitchen sink,
these hands, in a froth of snow
when the morning is too cold for flying.


II.

If you could, for once,
hold this soap of my soul,
touch its transient warmth,
could smell the scent of me,
it would still not be me but merely an echo of I,
a thin drift, a feathering for the moment,
a gift: should you wish to claim it.
And once claimed, I can only dream the ways
you would shape me beneath your weight, carve
a place to bury your face, to bury your secrets,
to bury the bruise of us. If I remember anything,
I shall remember this: I can neither remain
a gift or a drift, a moment is but a path
to something for once far greater
than you or I alone could ever know.


III.

Even from your city, you have felt
the rise and fall of my laughter, my fear;
the landscape of breath that carries me
from season to season. You know
these dreams, my news reports have been
delivered to your door with unabashed regularity
as I am shaped by this need to have you know me,
to be that gutter fed trickle, signs of a neighbor
who hand washes the sidewalk even in winter
so that, when water begins to flow uphill,
you will come, will find this place,
will find me beautiful.


IV.

Whatever happens to us will happen
on separate sheets, different chapters, will be
snowflakes on far flung blood fields,
the only common characteristic
being that which defines us: war
with ourselves, our own skins,
our own limitations. What time is granted
is granted unrequited, love,
it presses itself into a downtown bus,
into all the forgotten spaces, you at one end
and I at another, afforded only so many glances,
for to look too often or too hard would be to regret
our very lives, how they are sewn
to this patchwork distantly, carelessly, our colors
matched more to those who were born to find us
than those we were born searching for.


**From All the Ways We Could Have Met