Come morning, there's no rain but the promise of rain
in the sky and in the body. I've done you bad damage
and don't yet know it, except in the slant of my nervous
hands when sometimes I remember to see them.
All night we didn't touch one another, only once
you put your hands to me and I to you like good
children examining wrapped gifts. You said, "you're so
different from me," and what I felt then--
that the home one loves in longing for home
is entirely other than that which I can make you--
was the same as what I'd learn too slowly later.
The clarity was sweet, then cool, then passed.
It got late. In my room, we built a place
I'd never been before, where it seemed safe to ask
some precipitous questions: faith, but not death; death,
but not bodies; bodies, but never our own. I remember
everything as dimly lit and blue, though I can't think
why that would have been—the moon? Then the surface
of the present like a rung bell humming, then silence,
then how silence saturates the space between lovers or friends
or other fragile arrangements of bodies trying carefully
to know one another; for such little space
there is so much color: cobalt, halo, almond, hail,
lashes, whites, stillness I did not take
for bracing, not for weeks.