Me, Undone

And this is love When old man death comes knocking at the door again She says There  With you  I will go  Down deep  And  When your soul has washed away  I will light the wick And carry you  Back Home 

you are that kind of human you wake every morning and know that all you treasure so close with guarded heart will go in time the sky passes above your crown never the same again yes you are that kind of human sometimes you stop in the dead of the day to see time moving in the back room it does not judge to hold, is to suffer, it calls. i will take all this from you lay it bare leave your bones to waste you are that kind of human the kind that rinses and repeats with imprints of slave lives buried deep in your coal black eyes and you are that kind of human still watering the seeds clearing out the weeds sweeping the porch and preparing your heart for more

she smells of sage and the binding of a new book discovered in a dying bookstore. she lets me in to read when she is not afraid. she builds things for a living I asked her to build us a library to read and grow old in and a home on the pacific with a garden to gather tomatoes and collard greens with our weathered hands. she dresses in safety. a plain t-shirt. a button down sweater. flat leather boots. hair pulled back tightly in to a ponytail and tucked. no makeup. no jewelry. nondescript CK underwear. she paces around the apartment making copious lists in perfectly straight lines in a black moleskin. she specializes in risk-benefit analysis and excel spreadsheets I run my fingers along the grooves etched in her forehead I notice them whenever she lifts her head to take a clear look at me to love a woman like me, I know, is her riskiest bet yet. no mitigation. no expectation of certainty. just plain courage.

And then she brushed against me strung herself across my lap lacing her heart around mine "We are threaded," she said. You are the coming. I am the going. I've mapped your ridges with my tongue.

I realize that beauty is fading fast It's the price we pay for wisdom and better days Webs move across the corners of my eyes soft folds have arrived at the edges of my smile I look out to see awkward teenagers struggling to chart a foreign landscape so precariously full of wide life the sun is beginning to set warm gold against my back this day is the best it will ever be ever more now I know that this body is not home simply a stunning arrangement casing for an expanse so wide the very thought of it makes me cry yes, the sun is setting warm gold against my back but we are not the sunset We are the very sky.

And then, she pondered the absurdity of life. Each moment. One by one. Pulled closer and wrapped into a cord tight around her neck. A jewel placed in the center. She had searched for days to find something to keep her here.   A twenty minute TED Talk. A self-help book.   All lovely, but ultimately ephemeral. Nothing could save the soul that now hung a corpse. Its rotten stink filling the air wherever she traversed. She had dreams of the sea rolling in and her dead mother coming with a blanket to protect her. Was it a gesture of comfort or a motioning to go forward?   Would she finally let her follow? “Nothing will ever be as beautiful,” she said as she stepped onto the chair. Beauty, a transitory and subjective human construction. With the lights dimmed now, she only saw shades of grey. In the bathroom, she examined the totality of her earthly experience. Is this what they spoke of? Was there nothing more? For the life of her, she could not remember wha...