throwback: 2007: the dream of words

Hope bore you home and when you came,
Mystery fell
And broke open wide,
Spilling whim and warmth and wash of wonder
Through your perfect crack in my chest:
An almond-eyed reflection, yet unique,
A sneak of mirrored miracle,
Where even the chimerical—
The expectation that so highly, so brightly,
So rightly shimmered—
Was shattered into shards
And at once outshone.
Blood of my blood,
Bone of my bone,
Belonging to the honor of hopes unknown,
Yet enough my own to have had opened for me
Portals into high promised places
And staircases up which my joy would fly.
An event, heaven-sent, across my soul,
You are purest emotion in cresting waves,
An inundating praise,
Evocatively deep,
So total it enfolds all of me,
Cleanses all I yearn to be,
Inspires stillness and silences science,
Turning all that is known in on itself
To become a single lash-loosed tear of sweetest truth
And a quivering kiss of fearful courage
Upon your cheek—
Roseate, meek and still too tender
For more than the none-gentler touch.
So hard to chase,
Harder to catch,
Hardest to keep,
It could be said of the wind,
And only then with a child’s imagination;
Yet I hold it, I do—
O, how I hold it when I hold you,
Treasure in my chest the breath it brings,
For such is to hold dear
The staying here in livingly loving you,
That I might have that air for song and find
Just one of my simply hummed harmonies
Lifted like a score of saintly symphonies
By the grace and the gift,
The gilt and the glory,
The grandeur of all you are to me.
You are beauty;
You are bounty;
You are every humility infinitely multiplied
By my very best moment in life.
To love you—
Just to bespeak the chance—
Is an expanse of the very rarest riches,
The wealth of worlds safekept in your eyes.
And though such thoughts are as songbirds
Penned onto a perch in the heart,
Where language, at times, truly tries
To survey them with lens of lyric,
You are beyond any tele-poetic gleam:
To love you can be only the dream of words—
Only the dream of words.

—for kj, 06.17.2007