i want to write poems for you. i look at your face and that's all i can do. 

i want to write the kind of poem that ten years from now, you'll dig out of a shoebox and unfold the yellowed paper and i'll say oh no don't remind me of that and we'll laugh about how completely love-stricken i am for you. 

i want to write the kind of poem that keeps you with me for the next ten years. 

i want to write about the way you laugh, the pleasure and the invitation of it. i want to write the kind of poem that will make you laugh. 

i want to write about your hands. i do write about your hands. how every ounce of human strength and grace and dignity somehow grew into ten furious fingers and your ability to choke me, hold me, cook and break and write and play and create. 

i want to write poems about how carefully you handle the hearts of those you love. 

i want to write about your smile and the way it crooks everyone in the room into whatever joke you are telling, i want to write about your eyes, your voice, your eyes. 

i want to write poems that will make you pause, poems that will make you think, poems that will sneak up on you a few hours later and whisper against the back of your neck just how much i love you. i want to write poems that make your skin warm. 

there are days when all i can do is look at you, because my voice gets caught in my throat, and my heart stops moving in my chest. i think that silence might be my last defense against the layers of my shame and history and fear that threaten to wedge themselves between us. there are days when all i can do is look at you because you are golden to me, a pillar of fire in the sky toward which i will always be walking. i have walked through the same desert for generations, but every life i have lived was walking toward you. 

i am as inept a writer as i am a lover, so instead of all these poems i would write for you i have written only this one. but i am not done writing, and i am not done loving.