Tenderness

I always thought lovers

(like cities, or oceans)

would only ever teach me about loss.

 

On various afternoons soaked with sun,

evenings drenched with longing and rain,

I found this for myself, and for the world.

Like a kernel of truth hitting hard against my insistent teeth.

 

You came:

You came here like an early spring,

fresh green leaves and flower scents in your wake.

You lay me down in evening light,

bathed my shoulders in golden,

eased out the various knots in my back

with warm and calloused hands.

You asked for nothing. 

(I have mapped, far too often, the insidious drafts that follow love into the room,

I have met, headfirst, passions that promise depth; but they always leave me 
a little hollow, parched and longing. I have dug my malicious teeth into too many
known places, left too many echoes, fragile beating scars, too many. I'm always
afraid, most of all of myself. You asked for nothing, and smiled a lot. You took
everything I said, as it was. Covered everything with wildflowers and wind.
You are magic, you leave no spaces through which I could scratch out
my familiar, despicable mistakes. There is only wildflowers and wind.)

I thought I knew all there was to know,

and every day, life gently proves me wrong.

It is tenderness you are teaching me about

and your gentle lessons settle in my voice like honey,

taste like redemptive sun on a ruined city.
You make me tender. Soft in the strongest ways.

 

So tonight, at the fort,

full to the brim with poetry and exhilaration,

I knew enough to pause

as the moon soaked unsuspecting clouds in light 
and stone walls shone golden through carved windows and crevices.

I knew enough to watch the landscapes of my sister's voice tremble

and remember how much I've forgotten to be kind to her.

 

It is tenderness I try to find tonight,

place my hands on her unsure shoulders

and ease the mountains and valleys of her back, the unsaid
distances, the silences like forgotten roads. Her muscles tense and ease
under my insistent hands, tense and ease. It feels less like loss and more like love.

It is alright to be lost, I want to tell her. It is alright to be
young and lost and a little sad sometimes.

 

Together, we listen to the unfamiliar rhythms of Rajasthani songs,

watch the candles flicker and the light falter.

Shadows flit through the arched doorways, but my bones are shafts of light. 
Your hand is right here, on mine, and I couldn't be gladder. 

Growing

The various structures of my mind

are breathing, inhaling and exhaling,

small window spaces open, open and growing.

The walls I built with stone and wood, now

collapse - but in a wonderfully surreal way,

they tilt and sway, they groan under weight of

Derrida Lacan Foucault Freud Deleuze Guattari Saussure 

and my mind hurts sometimes, muscles straining to

comprehend, fists tight and jaw clenched, still waiting

for paradise as a place where I can sit. Sit, not stand,

not move, not constantly be moving, there is no comfort

in an understanding that opens windows and doors but also

breaks walls, hurtles the raw power of wind on the pillars,

nudges the very ground on which I stand until it expands

inwards, to a single dark point in the distance. My mind

hurts, yes, but my soul is nourished, it is bruised but it

grows, the various multiplicities of my mind refuse to be

flattened, and Eliot and Roy murmur deep in my ears, 

I understand things about beauty and love and life that

I never did. I see the world as darker than it ever was,

but I see stars. I lie down in oceans of light, and I trace

connections on the taut skin of sky, I create constellations,

I breathe, deep and unaware, deep, so deep that the world

decides in a flash to breathe with me, press thundering heart

against my flutter-bird chest, and inhale. Exhale. Inhale. 

I tremble at these various gladnesses.