Tonight I want to tell you
how I’ve been talking with stones
and dying flowers.
About resistance innate in things,
and how to revive the dying art of conversation.
How recently I wash my shrinking hands
until they are pink and smooth
like something newly born.
Raw as someone without a history,
as if it were easy
to scrub clean and shed the past
in so many amnesiac layers of skin.
Maybe this vibration in the air is the feeling
that we all wish the world had gone a different way.
I think about my grandfather’s lungs
with recurring frequency these days,
and that morning when you lay beside me
curled on your side, breathing a gentle calm.
How we took in the same sun-lit air
in that instant and I was grateful
that we all still exist
even if it is at increasing intervals of distance,
and glad that, of everyone, you were closer.