you remind me of hands, of dancing, of feeling wildly secure.
your eyes are not my glue,
nor your mouth, no, certainly
not your mouth,
nor any other part of your body
my pencil prefers to matte my paper
coating it with fragments, cringeworthy,
overworn,
fraught with grammatical error
just like the letter from the boy
who stopped writing last month
when I told him
my heart is blue and it pumps blood, etc.
having lost the last of your voice
I am unbounded now by sound. I swear
I do not
remember the first five words you told me
nor my response, boundless
or full of walls, (I don’t recall)
your irises
as they felt the warm blue sunlight
leap across their perfect buds
we wrote on walls,
our heavy footfalls
drawing faces in the dust.
for nine minutes I waited for your hand,
the left,
gnarled and eloquent as the first time
I watched it dance down the frets,
but it never came.
I was a fool to believe (and with such conviction) that any of your songs,
rosy eyes,
were for me.
there is a design, i swear it. and it may not be in your blood or in your genetic makeup, but believe me, it exists. your body is acutely aware of the part of you that acts not out of necessity, but is instead propelled by some sweet cosmic motion. some people give it a name. they call it God. others will call it Allah, or divine creation, or a higher power. i call it love.
whatever it is, it pulls a postal worker mourning the loss of his wife out of bed and to his letters each morning; it drives an exhausted mother to work at dawn and back to her children again as the sun begins to set; it holds hands with a painter on a park bench. it is this design, simple yet intricately woven and thoroughly applied, that stirs within us and between us and through us and around us. it is this design that keeps us and holds us close and wraps us tightly and promises never to leave us, even when we leave ourselves. there is a design. this is true and it is the only thing that we can be certain of because it is the absolute fabric of our universe. emotion would not be emotion if it were purely chemical. bonds would be physical and we would not recognize beauty, would not experience or recall events with a deep sense of curiosity. there are things that we think we know, and there are things that none of us know. there are things that we’ve come to know and account differently, as physicists and atheists and musicians and philosophers. we’ve seen the stars, and if we haven’t seen them, we’ve reached up and felt them. there is a design.
