We love like cedars. I remember as a child learning the phrase
“a catch in the throat” and thinking it beautiful, thinking it strange,
how words are like bees that sting our insides and turn them to buzzed,
buzzed as in after a few good beers, buzzed as in electric,
and I love you like that, with my heart caught in my throat too
in the shape of a whisper, with the whisper casting a shadow
in the shape of the word yes.
And yes, I do hold myself responsible, I hold you responsible
for holding me like you’d never let go; we love like cedars,
like trees that are like hands reaching to the sky.
If I were syntax you’d be the semantics to my every exhale,
you’d be the only decipherer of this foreign language,
these forgotten hieroglyphics that I call my heart.
It’s perfect, isn’t it, how the sounds we make together
could only be called language, how our bodies
are simultaneously the best escape we’ve ever had
and the very worst.
We spellcheck each other’s sighs, and we love like apple trees:
starting from dirt, from roots, into blossom.
We planted, we grew, and then we knew:
our love was not the pause the comma makes,
but instead everything
a blank page cannot say.