Sonata

I think of how your skin feels in between my fingers, of how your nose pressed against me makes for calmer seas. Of how your hair finds the paths on the inside of my hand. Each strand of it is akin to those wound around a violin, a subtle sonata kept closely there in the inches you might measure from your ear to my own sternum. Surely little moments like these that I find pacing back and forth inside are meant as messages, letters written in calligraphy by shifty spirits. They say to stay and yet I never listen. I am held in contempt in the courts of butterflies and warm hellos, I am both the turnkey and the lock itself. I leave when I feel that it is necessary, when my demands and tumultuous circumstances cast clouds above that pretty little thing that they call love. Your skin sends lightning through my muscles when I touch it, when you’ve granted me the right to run my own across it. Your body reaches out through space and severs every aching inch of me, into pieces I am split and into pieces I remain. I crave your tongue below my thumb, I crave your back bent and contorted, flesh melting into flesh and steps one after two into the river. Knee deep in you is where you’ll find me. Swimming circles with my breath held, swimming circles on my back. Knee deep and slipping slowly up until you meet my neck and jaw and lips alike. I can feel the fronds and cottonwood, the frogs and cottonmouth twisted up in one another. My lungs, they fill with water, with you, but from inside where I might drown from lack of care. I crave another moment with your fingernails fighting for the grooves. I pine and slide right back. My body stretching in the sun and into you, each limb a master of its own demise, broken and battered and bruised. I’m tossed this way and that, through the current, through your precious schedules, crashing face first atop the rocks. My bones are broken in the seconds that you don’t decide to give me, as a gift or as a blessing.

I beg and barter with my heart to stop its beating when it seems to only beat me to the point. I cannot tell it what to do nor ask it gently or with anger in the notes and tones I choose. I am a song still sung long after everybody in the audience has tossed their plastic cup and driven off. I’m the speaker still left humming underneath the awning. I’m the one that started this and I’m the one that smells the smoke that sifts through bramble and the branches, down through valley after valley. Commotion comes and all the animals begin to cough and wheeze, the frog and cottonmouth release each other after all. There’s trees that splinter in the wind and gusts kick up to uplift nests where babies rest. A firestorm arrives and I am caught with rabbit out of hat. No magic tricks to save this lovely thing I’ve found. I pull my body from the water’s edge and wonder if it’s best to run. I wonder if it will always be this same exact occurrence when I find you in the other lives I’ll live. If finding you means starting forest fires. If finding you means losing you again.