In the darkness, your wrist with every red thread was brighter
than the moon, and my hands the needle, trying to stitch you up.
There were mornings when the wind came in from the sea
and lifted the papers nailed to the yellow corkboard walls
until they rippled like moving flesh, each one covered
with tally marks for every day you looked out a window
without trying to scare yourself away from jumping through it.
Every bone was a bridge to the next, back of your spine
like some creaking shadow box I filled with all my favorite things as a child,
discovering each new knob with more joy than the first.
For awhile, I felt like the same person I had been before,
lying there tucked to your chest, everyone else waking
to make coffee or trying to convince themselves
to get up on the right side of the bed, but then I remembered
how you had touched me as if trying to turn the ocean
into a completely different shape, to make it full instead of shapeless,
touched me like mountains were something you could move,
and even though nothing was really different,
everything was.