This poem is my quiet love letter, it is an ode to pure devotion without desire. I wrote it to honor someone whose presence and love I cherish deeply. It is a poem about witnessing, about care, about a love that is patient, tender, and entirely alive.
I have loved you
as I loved Latin names,
scrawled in the serrated margins
of my old notes,
each genus a brittle hinge,
each syllable a breath
I held without breaking.
Clarias anguillaris was my favorite ache,
and you are the current;
tapered, stark,
in the ways that matter most.
Your eyes resemble tapioca pearls,
brown as wet fertile earth,
the silt of old winters settled in the grain.
I watch the black pupil
soften into a sudden warmth,
a slow death of the ego
where midnight surrenders
to a honeyed dawn.
Those pearls splinter my soul,
as if nature conspired in your making
solely to rewrite me,
only to unmake me.
I fall into the depths;
the stag's heart racing
beneath the archer's trembling thumb,
time starts to dissolve.
For the first time
I am no observer of the past or a fear of the future,
I am finally, agonizingly, present.
I fall into them, gently,
the way stacked Jenga collapse into themselves,
once you have finally acted.
Your hair is stolen sunlight,
the bruised bronze of an autumn riverbank,
catching the day
without ever having to ask.
I trace it only in thought
slowly, faithfully
memorizing the shape of you
without reach of hand,
without poverty of touch.
Are we reflections of a single light?
Held in a cold, parallel drift;
never colliding,
never grasping,
two currents that acknowledge
their similtude in the other.
I know, with a certainty
that asks nothing of proof,
that you are entirely,
achingly whole,
and that I am held
merely by standing next to you.
I have no use for the hunger of hands,
nor the shallow depth of a kiss;
I require only your presence,
the silent continuum of your breathing,
the way your being
leans against mine
and stays so still
I dare not draw a breath.
Clarias anguillaris,
my favorite genus,
and you;
my favorite boy,
my steady light
invading every empty space I used to be.
I am patient.
I hold your reflection,
without the greed of grasp,
the void of hunger.
I am rejuvenated life
ignited as your witness.
For in the intricacy of you,
the universe abandons chaos
and settles.
J & A,
A & J,
no thought to how,
it holds.
-AT