One More Night And It'll Be Too Late

My favorite gesture is his fingers running through my hair, but his fingers fade into smoke before reaching my strands of hair.

He plays connect the dots with the beauty marks on my back, but his lips never reach my back.

His sad eyes speak before his mouth begins to form the words, but they never reach my ears.

And just as he walked away, he turned to write these words:

'Is there poetry in your hands? Do the dactyls of your fingers sing

old songs, before language was ever conceived? Are there rivers

under your skin, the soft turquoise veins carrying on with the rings

of red blood cells, traversing like wayward ships? If there’re slivers

in your curved, porcelain palms, among flowering knuckles and lace

creases then I will pull them out, gently, and dab a wet wash cloth

to wash away small holes among the many pores. I ask you: trace

my outline as I have traced yours in the grey wings of a little moth

and in the undulant verses of pink and red clouds in still summer air.

I can only give you these words, these syllables, these quiet inflections;

but they are not the poems in your hands, your fingernails, and your hair

draped across your forehead which is dusk and night in your complexion.

So all I can do is write these words, which fall to the ground like wheat,

yellow, collected in sheaves, whispering in a breeze of your summer’s heat.'