Sublimation

I.

We crisscrossed the country

twice, stitching together a geography of home

from back roads and interstates,

and those mile markers between us.  

Along the avenues of Philadelphia, we were two

palms pressed together, fondling

renegade freedom in the cracks between

what we'd been and who we'd become.

We were intrepid, traveling winding two tracks

up a mountain’s steepest slope, until

we slid into a snowdrift, and

let loose our fear with laughter.

Atop the world, we were gorgeous, flinging

desire over crested hills into the fertile valley where

we imagined a hearth of stone and fire

and the fields we might unearth one day.

I had never been so in love.

II.

With you, silence was easy as girls

on street corners. You were a short skirt,

bare thighs and belly rising, falling

as you stretched into a single word. And

you were all angles and dangerous

ledges where one footstep might send me

plummeting into the canyon and colors of you.

How many times I shifted whole landscapes just

to be in your proximity, how many times

you broke through mantle to crack

the core of me. This is the sum

of my wanting what couldn't be

possessed: earth and sky, the trembling

of our lips parted to breathe one another.

III.

You are water rushing over the rocks of me

into a suddenly still river, where we waded

barefoot upon smooth stones.

That we return and return to each other

is evidence of faith only in what is:

Wherever you fall, I will follow.

Wherever you rise, I will break surface.




©Ami Mattison, 2011


Flickr photo courtesy of sabrina's stash