Ode to A Moth That Drowned In My Bathtub One Midsummer Morning
Did Icarus love the sea?
Did he gasp in gratitude
when it closed over his head,
deep enough to drown the fire of failure
and draw him down to the kindly dark?
As if God was insecure about his height
As if the sun could give a shit
that you tickled the thermosphere for a hot minute.
The truth is we were never going to reach the sun
and we never intended to.
What matters is, we flew away.
Crashed into the sea
The way you
Crash into me
The way you
Are suddenly there, all of you
Bursting out fully-formed,
foreheads be damned.
Just so, I tripped over you
Crashed into
the world you made for me
the world you became for me.
Your light isn’t like the sun -
blazing, burning, casting all things in sharp relief.
It comes shy and quiet, like the man said,
on little cat feet.
Your light doesn’t refract
It ricochets
A thousand shards bouncing from mirror to mirror
deeper and deeper
into a subterranean complex.
Somewhere below, ancient mechanisms stir
The temple opens like a puzzle-box
When one stray shard of light
One lost thing with wings, looking for a way out
Crashes into me.
Kind and soft and deep as water
I burrow and try
to bury myself in your hair
and dream of sparks in the night sky
Like a pillow made of violet petals -
softer than any dead thing,
saturated with life
I immerse myself in
a purple darker than any sky.
I press my face into your belly
feel your hands run through my hair
your blood run through my veins
your voice that makes the taut string of me -
no-longer-tense, torn thing, the leather and wax -
string itself again, as if the liar’s lyre could forgive,
and thrum with a note I’ve heard before.
Lady in the water, I still feel your fingers
I still hear you calling
You meant to bring me home,
to the home I’ve never known
and instead I bid you stay
bid you, “Come away,
inhuman child, from the water and the wild”
And though the world was full of weeping
You understood
And came home anyway.
One day, I know
I’ll open a door - always try doors -
a door in a hill, perhaps -
and you’ll be there,
when I thought you were at home.
You’ll be the door, and the hill, and the world
and I’ll vanish into your navel
I’ll crash into
the purple depths of you.
Into a kinder world where no sun burns
where the stars are wistful and remote
where live those certain dark things
we learned to love.
