Tilt

I tilt her head to the side, following
the curve of her jawbone with lucid eyes.
I come from a place of longing, a shadowed mossy glen darkened
from the world outside, cornered off from the laughing light of day,
strangled by desire.

Each breath she takes is
smooth like a skating rink
The condensation lifts from her expirations and
forms a cloud on the windowpane.
Standing behind her, I paint a flower in
the dewy frost, sing gentle folk songs in her sea shell ear,
create a story of spring in her body of winter.

Inexplicably, her eyes well up with salty fluid
and begin to bleed transparent tears.
I make my figure concave, I pull her
inward towards my fraying flannel shirt, comfort her with fairy tales,
give her a solid beginning, a tangible rebirth.

At this angle, she is a precise unit of being
A perfected line of pencil on the
clean white printer paper of my yearning.
I gently lay my hands over her ice cold
fingers, moving them up to the fragile skin of her
ivory face, smudging the droplets of water expelled from her organs of sight.

We are a Venn diagram, this is where we
come together.
In this game of our lives we have met for a moment
bonded as one, and now, like magnets forced apart by greater hands,
like a body retrieved from a crumpled car post hit and run, like
a grandmother, brittle and frail, dying in a stale hospital ward,
we must, at last, learn to let go.