Yearning

I carry you beneath my ribs
like a country I was exiled from before I knew its name.
There are roads in me that lead only toward you,
fields bending beneath an invisible wind,
doors opening onto rooms where you have never stood
and yet have somehow left your perfume.

What cruelty, that the body remembers what the hands cannot have.

Tonight I would give anything
for the smallest geography of you:
the warm province of your shoulder,
the soft border of your breast,
the hidden country between your breath and mine.

I do not need forever.

Give me one hour
in which distance forgets itself.

I would say nothing.

I would simply sit beside you
until our shadows intertwined.

Until then, I am left wanting.

Wanting you quietly.
Wanting you terribly.
Wanting you with the patience of oceans
that spend their whole lives reaching for a shore
they are destined to touch…
and lose…
and touch again.

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