thin cold river

we always say things,

things like

be mine

and love me

and hold me

and never let me

go.

(recently I spun out

from the trappings of

your love.

i uncoiled the twists of rope

and jumped into a cold

shallow

ocean, and if I let

my arm drop to the bottom,

it touched the

barnacle seaweed

floor, and if

I opened my eyes

I saw green

glowing dots

of plankton in between.)

we always reach

towards each other

the same way,

with extended fingertips,

marveling at the reality

of each other’s skin,

the warmth of each other’s

flesh, the beating underneath

of each other’s

pulse, the uplifted gashes of each other’s

purple scars.

(yesterday I rowed

out into the middle of the lake,

hoping no one would see me there,

and that my thoughts

would gradually shift

away from syntax and into the rhythmic

pull of the oars, leaning forward and

back, forward and back, forward

and back, before taking off my clothes

and jumping in the water

off the tippy black boat,

squeezing thoughts of snapping turtles

from my eyelids, shaking copper

droplets from my face)

we always pull each other

nearer at night,

give each other squeezes

to resist each other’s

inevitable disappearance, each other’s

inevitable drifting away,

as we then always fit the convex and cave curves

of our bodies into one other until we

feel as close to

one body as we can.

(this morning I woke up

alone, cart wheeled my legs out

from stiff crinkled sheets, and wandered down

in silence

to the cold thin river

where rocks emerged like small hills.

i walked slowly over the slick

hard bottom and sat in the cold thin

water and leaned back until

the burbling white flow covered my ears.

I looked up and saw the swaying

green leaves--oak, maple, hemlock--

all swinging in the wind as one.)

it is all always the same

and nobody owns any of it. the thin river,

my goosebump coated ribs,

the dead twisting branches.

it belongs to the same

nothing and acts according

to no one, and according

to none of it.

and all of it knows no

happiness like the emptying of

thoughts--forward and back, forward

and back, forward and back—

like the blank flow

downstream in the thin cold water. 

dls