i could never have expected the depth of you, the way your mouth can douse me whole. i have been swimming for years in the wide open grey, a tide wrenched against her own lunar needs, capturing detritus and refusing to crest. who i am is more refraction than fact, more illusion than carbon; they see my work, but cannot see me.
you rise me pure over the arch of your eyebrow, the slant of your smile, a soft crash on the rocks of my ego every time. i am bloated with these years, belly-up and hoping for the sky.
in the water are a million ways i could love you, leave you, drown you, breathe you. i could no more demand you than separate any single drop of water out of my body.
you are story already, shaped in air and earth. what you design will stand for decades.
so a myth and a legend meet on the shore, standing in quicksand and shaping the world. the shine of you on this morning meets the glow that's been building in my blood.
like all things in the tidal pools we could grow forever, an ecosystem all our own. or we could get drawn out, in moments or at once, tossed free or crawled home, the moment gone. questions of coastline and current i cannot answer; i can only hold my salt and shells and bones in both hands while the moon moves me around.