How we met

How we met

I
Through the dark, I feel
the phone, ringing, ringing in the cathedral
of the small hours of my dreams & dread.
and (like I had just felt the crack-of-the-whip) i sit
straight-up in my bed; fear and loathing (thick-as-smoke
smelling like a doused campfire, and heavy as
a deep fore-boding) for one moment, makes it hard to
clear my throat, (or move at all), but then

i am up, out-of-bed; flying across the wooden floor
naked (it is not That cold here, yet) but chilled, with
frantic, horrid scenarios of burning car crashes
and family deaths, flipping through the front of my brain
in an orgy of self-flagellation and breathless panic;
it is the hour of the wolf, astride the darkness and the light,
the time when most men die, when most souls are born;
.
your voice, seems so (oddly) blasé… denying the gravity
of the whispering light, the fears of the night, it keens,
taut as a guitar string, breathless, fingernail-digging and begging
In a panic (from just one block away) …… “ I know
that I’ve just met you ….. but, ‘couldju’…. I mean …..I…need….
You to come here, right now…. I’m……………………”
.

II
through the window, the trembling dawn watches me
stumbling into pants and grabbing twice-worn shirts,
dressing like a fireman-with-the-bell-clanging & less than 30 seconds
to slide-down-the-pole, stumble out the front door –
into the grey Maine half-light, gasping a slice of bitter, winter wind-bite –
running & wrapping one feeble scarf against the razor wind
and the breathless, cold silence …
.
III
And on your thresh hold, in clouds of breath, between my first knock and the next,
your door flings-open, & i find you, pale and shivering, your hands between
your flannelled thighs, with eyes full of a puppy’s questions;
i step over, and you inhale me (like a castaway finding water),
wordlessly enfolding your quivering bones
to my chest, i pull all of you, flat against the blazing furnace
of my heart, filling your trembling cup with the dark
brew of my protection, and we stand cocoon-like for moments and hours
.
Much later (after jump-starting your heart), and moving upstairs,
We huddle, enfolded now, and quilt-wrapped, against the wall,
in the tiny corner of your narrow bed, swaddled like orphans-found,
we sit safely-entwined (protected from gnomes and demons,
and all their worrisome-whispers), and complete a crash-course in
“these things happened, and this is me, now”; our flesh and bones, newly-grown-together,
but (somehow) long-known & as familiar as a song in the head,
with breaths, falling into step, we feel the freshness of age-old friendship,
and the sense of having clung

to each other, forever.