“Intimacy, whether found or lost,
              is a sure thing.”
                         
   – Stacey D’Erasmo, on writing

III.            

it’s 3 a.m., & i’m riding
the rings of Saturn.

                         at 2 a.m., i’d given up
                         sleep.  i needed answers.
                         i’d started outsourcing
                         experience.

anyone who’s dated
online—knows—that
moment when you ask

                        to take a step further:
                        to move to the phone
                        revealing & finding
 
voice; it’s when you step
from fantasy to tangible,
when an interest becomes

                        a person.  in short:  More.
                        it’s impossible to hear them
                        & not, in a way, know them.

i have your words.
i have description
of voice.  so i search

                       google gold dust woman.
                       sound app for waves on a shore—
                       chorus of crickets at night~
                       breeze to stir the trees.

& NASA, now, to settle
beneath blankets of space—
too much space & too much
 
                       silence; you’d shared
                       shades of silence, too.
                       but silence, the kind
                       of silences you shared

are the secrets of intimacy
& proximity we do not (yet)
have.

                      it’s 3 a.m., & i’m still
                      laying in the dark
                      of questions & possibility.

                 ***   ***   ***

II.  

Scribe it in blood—
carve it in flesh.

                     This breath.
                     This wish.

This runic landscape
just beneath skin,

                     like temples,
                     like labyrinths

of possibility
buried beneath

                      viscera
                      & tendon

connecting spirit
& bone.

                     Paint it in need,
                     drown it in release.

                     You
                     & Me

subsumed by
We.

               ***   ***   ***

I.  

There is a place
between here & there
where we arrive

               at a choice.

Meet me at the tree
(your favorite tree, or
the willow that weeps
from my childhood);

choose to
                    fall
into its cradle space.

There’s a knot
in a trunk
of hope & the sun
is waiting
                  for an us.

A tiny opening/a light wish:

             I’ve been lost in the semblance, the memory, of a kiss
             that has not been discovered—between lips that have only
             yet imagined the secrets whispered, one pair to the other,
             & first taste of a mirrored dance.
                                                                               Stop imagining.
                                                                                                Come
             with me
             there, where we forget all that’s intellectual or logical or effectual &
             
             choose
             this
             refrain:
                           
                            Hands, together, palm to palm, face to face, forgetting
                            anything but the flight along legs open to wonder / or pressed
                            between pages, against chests, to remember, room left only
                            for the energy of souls, drawing nigh & nigher, that ev’ry wing’ed breath
                            might break into fire; that what is written, story to story, poem to poem, gasp
                            to contented gasp, would set words reeling~~spinning~~Be
                            something more than what we, as post-romantic writers, can
           
                            create
                                 
                            after the reality
 
                                                           of once

                                                                           or the fantasy

                                                                                                        of once upons
                                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                      to the only once

that matters:

The Once
More.