Response

The hardest thing is to start with a blossom, a roadmap, a partial face appearing red and illegal. Damp skinflash is a granite you writhe in, unknowably near.

I leap and barely land on you. Swinging your lapses beneath me, star-dry, we flinch, soporific even, this music of erosion.

Afraid my tongue will be caught in amber, I do not trust me to let go. You have spent thousands of years crested in lavender and corduroy, untouched, carved from basalt.

All along, it's been about water, how it steadies us, how our buoyancy is pliable in all angles. A before-ness, plural and storm-scented, builds its walls from algal ponds, joining you to earth.

We did not account for drought. But thought and its cell-strands, white winesap on your curling tongue.

Even though it rains, my body is occluded and cataracted. Even this precipitation shrugs, chooses its life.

You are floodgate and waterfall. Sawtooth and jacaranda.

When the water vaporizes, how will we see each other without bending light, always bendable light? With only seconds left, I am searching, amorous, spherical, avalanching inward, making purgatories glow with my breath.