i see your light

and raise you a tin roof

maybe grow you that lemon tree you once dreamed of

i will make a home of your bones, muscle and arrogance

don’t need much, really

just you

a soft place to fall

and rise

and glow

and repeat

i’ll find the words to put it down

make it linger

make it linger deep and sweet

she was as tangled inside

as the tree above her

branches vining for the sun,

the rarified air

in intricate dance

of dependance

and efficacy of self

the swan was clearly at war with herself and

would turn and turn

leaving a wake of entangled circles and

watery webs of ego

of restlessness

and squandered hours of flight

she was a careful girl, our tess

counting her sheep to sleep

the stars visible through her window,

and the seven people dear to her that she prayed for each night

but then she would fall into legend,

romantic notions and esoterica

and, in the morning, regather herself to her worldly self,

leaving her dreams behind

whereas i

i counted nothing

lived each day as if it were legend

drowning in romantic notions

holding myself up by esoterica alone

she is sad, she is happy

she is hopeful

tripped up by her roots

caught up in the moonglow

following her solitude forward to what you

what you and all of us know

watered

acknowledged

and not yet underground

held there

warm in her pocket

her hands

a light so blue, so uncanny

so early it is almost gray

so soft it is almost

still

night

so full of dreams it can only be

well,

well-deep, lit at the surface

held tight and quiet below

…and i feel at a loss

there considering him (molloy, i presume) in his borrowed room and time

and back to that day between water and hills and a road where two men met not knowing one another before

water, hills, road, or perhaps, they had

one returning, one leaving

or, perhaps, not

and my narrator, the observer, there above them, gray as the stone he huddled against

it is his memory, then, of this meeting and leave-taking

his observance and forgetting of what, perhaps, was once a death foretold

she had no recourse but to let it go

all of it

the narrow, exquisite field of his attention

wherein she felt everything there is to know of warmth and suspension

there in that silkenly-woven intercourse between them

as that intercourse constructed of webs and want and willowing and wandering

was, also, a discourse met on terms of indiscretion

she had no other recourse, really

she had to accept his volley for what it was

surgical

shattering

now hot in her hands

and stone in her chest

there

in his full-dark flatland

where the quiet is so quiet

lest the birdsong

and the shivering trees

where forever he could just hold me

and i

i could just dream