I

The way I sleep dreamless in the velvet
peace of you. How do you reconcile with some-
one you love, that your scattered winds and over-
abundance injured when they needed air
to breathe and space with which to breathe it?
I see the glint in your eyes from the night
fires of North Carolina. We, two birds, circle
above whirling storms; do we not wish to be buried
beneath each other’s feathers? I, weeping, drag my body
up to the air again to crawl through clouds to you.
The psychiatric care, the shift in talk therapy,
the stones of firmament in a road I build,
two Pomeranians, one tawny, one black, entangled
as sweetly and instinctively as our limbs always
have been. To love is not to possess but to protect
no matter the fires endured, the failures your own feet guide you to,
that like an angel you seek only their comfort
and a release from pain into the arms of joy
whether perfumed by your name or clouded
with the sweetened air of silence. So long as
those pleasures remain, your love encased in velvet
and calico and black, then the heart’s desire
to reconcile and lean your face into that shoulder
of that completing love, the one that drew to close
the roaming of your once-pilgrim heart, that in two
become three the circle completes, then reconciliation
remains not idle dream or phantasmal memory.
You, a whole person, with life and loves beyond
the boundary of my swirling eye, deserve only
the silent grace of angels restoring the wounds
of your too-strong heart to the threaded and bound
fibers of that vibrant fist of muscle. If I can
be of use to your joy, richly deserved, please, I beg,
lend wings to your voice and call me
back to the feathered bed that I may press
my lips to your cheeks, your eyes, and whisper
that you are not just a home but someone
who deserves too to find a home, carved
in the four hollows of my heart. Lay our heads
down and rest in the velvet peace of:

II

How could I, a faulty heart, be scared of your faultless anger

which arises only when my earnest desires to love

you become shrapnel embedded in the flesh? No,

the heat of your impassioned heart, even when

those flashing fires turn against me, provokes no fear

nor fright; only the desire to repair and strengthen myself

that I might not scattered broken shards of glass in the winds

of my billowing spirit, but feathers to cascade

in gentle grace, to succor you when you are weary,

to administer the balm of love when you, so strong,

need at last to lay your own head down

and be loved as you love, to hold your heart

in cupped hands and with devotion I was too foolish

to know to give to you breathe peace into your lungs.

I do not wish my love to be storms, but idylls of flowers,

a sea of petals in blue and yellow and green and red and gold

and white and everything between, that you might lay

and find peace instead of confusion. I want

to hold your hand in mine and ask you

your favorite color again, where you went to school,

the names of old friends and classmates, all again,

slow as rain held aloft by the updrafts of summer heat

rolling freshly north over the Carolinas toward Virginia.

As an arrow I flew to every target, without mind

to the notion that I’d already found you, the final piece missing

from the tapestry of my healed heart.

I wish no more to fly but to be laid to ground

in the verdancy of you, wrapped as we might have been

in those Minnesota rooms, three bodies locked chest to back

and the perfect peace I felt

which I pray desperately passed through me to your own wounded heart

and to lay in that peace forever, three retired knights

with crossed buried swords, asleep beneath the cross

of a unifying grace found by chance and healed

by conscious effort. That I strive to fix my heart

because I love you as truly as love can

to be that which you need, of me or another,

to rest with closed eyes and breathe.

Show me your mother, your hometown, your

days of wild drinking and the songs and poems

slung from your lips to heaven in passionate prayer

to be or cease to be, honored and dishonored both,

that I may know you and rejoice not in myself

but in the fullness and wholeness of you.