fireinthebrain

geneva (aka henrriika, but with all those double letters its easier to just dub her as G-town) wrote back to me and painted a picture of what my time with her would be like and its a very pretty picture, oh its really very pretty, and it would be so nice if that picture would just... fade into life, the way it does in the movies where the little blobs of paint in the old brown bound book become people and paperboys yelling and horses clattering by and then the orchestra strikes up and off you skip into the scenery im getting carried away but the point is before i do any skipping (or tripping) i have what feels like a laundry list of responsibilities to handle and questions to answer and i just need a moment to myself to understand my priorities. i hope that will happen at grandmothers late friday night when everything slows down.

I am trying to trust, just trust. i have become many things over this year, changed some things while others have remained unchanged. but trusting is not something i have become.

Insomniac

I open my eyes to see how the night
is progressing. The clock glows green,
the light of the last-quarter moon
shines up off the snow into our bedroom.
Her portion of our oceanic duvet
lies completely flat. The words
of the shepherd in Tristan, "Waste
and empty, the sea," come back to me.
Where can she be? Then in the furrow
where the duvet overlaps her pillow,
a small hank of brown hair
shows itself, her marker that she's here,
asleep, somewhere down in the dark
underneath. Now she rotates
herself a quarter turn, from strewn
all unfolded on her back to bunched
in a Z on her side, with her back to me.
I squirm nearer, careful not to break
into the immensity of her sleep,
and lie there absorbing the astounding
quantity of heat a slender body
ovens up around itself.
Her slow, purring, sometimes snorish,
perfectly intelligible sleeping sounds
abruptly stop. A leg darts back
and hooks my ankle with its foot
and draws me closer. Immediately
her sleeping sounds resume, telling me:
"Come, press against me, yes, like that,
put your right elbow on my hipbone, perfect,
and your right hand at my breasts, yes, that's it,
now your left arm, which has become extra,
stow it somewhere out of the way, good.
Entangled with each other so, unsleeping one,
together we will outsleep the night."

by Galway Kinnell