You emblazon into our space
bundled like an Inuit against the cold,
Or draped and laconically unfurled like an orchid blossomed
in the humid summers


You slide amongst us with the grace of fog over water,
and disperse as wistfully, leaving
in your beautiful absence
a melancholy like a field of Iowa wheat,
in the post harvest night,
expansive and borderless


In the recesses of your face,
beneath aqueous, tempered eyes,
and the shadows in the depths
where your lips begin,
I find in you the hints of a searcher
Unfulfilled,
traipsing through a forest,
but finding only more wilderness,
and deepening lightlessness


I see you, across from me, not yet full of your many beauties
In your wearying smile, I want to guide you, for
once you match this world in scale,
shedding the jejune surroundings of life scaled back,
of searches on hiatus,
You will open in ways unforeseen by you,
transparent to a romantic like me.


Your legs will steady as if founded,
Passions, unexpected, will be unearthed,
excavated from the dust of failure, (which coats us all in an ever growing layer, the sedimentary deposits of losses incurred)
and what is now unappreciable -
The stillness of nighttime along the Schuylkill, and the world beyond it unchanged and ever present
- will be appreciated


It will be achingly beautiful
to watch your vacant parts,
that long and search for the ineffable,
be filled by more quantifiable moments
as your world bends to fit your scope


My flint rock heart, sparking,
envies the man who will see it;
my own vacant parts begging you to fill them
with your loquacious toes and fingers