I see your body in the static of Picasso’s Blue Period, your hand distorted
into a midnight mitten, my breasts clouds’ shadows over a mesa or the
valley between
White Elephants. I put my ear-cone to your chest to hear your heart
turning
over new blood, tumbling it through the ventricles. I still haven’t told
you I love you,
but we both know I do. Just like the grandfather clock’s pendulums, or
the old rolltop desk
in my wing in my grandparents’ home, dusty yellow dirt roads, knew I
loved them, too.
It’s easy and hard to first accept love, as when an unfamiliar creature
sprawls
out longer than you, to breathe in time beside you on a couch in the
afternoon,
sun streaming in through the skylight illuminating his fur of yellow
ochre curls.