Of glass and porcelain

<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/4824.png"/> There is a creature beneath the surface of me;restless, enormous, older than naming that rises whenever you turn your face toward the windowand the light finds your glasses first,then, slow as a sacrament,finds your eyes. Brown as the October water at Wallowa,brown as the silt beneath,brown as the thing that breathes down thereand does not die. --- I have pressed my ear to stranger shores.I have listened for the sound of Godin the reeds, in the collapsed mouths of old volcanoes.But nothing: nothing prepares a man for the architecture of you. The curve of your shoulder is a shoreline I keep returning to,shipwrecked and grateful,grateful and ruined.The slope from your waist to your hip.I set my hand there like a hymnal,like a boy in a pew who has just learned,that holiness is somethingyou can touch. --- When you speak, it is not perfect.The syllables come a little sideways,a little soft around the edges,oh, but Mother, oh, but mercyit is the most honest sound I have ever been undone by.Not the voice of angels in their terrible geometry,but something closer:a human thing,warm and imprecise and mine.A sentence that begins in one place,and ends somewhere tender and unplanned,the way all the best rivers do. --- And my heart Eugene, I am not well. My heart has grown teeth.It presses against the ribs like something that has remembered it is wild,like the monster remembering the whole dark width of the lake is hers. It says: Hold her! Don’t let go.You stand at the edge of something,the waters very deep,and you do not mind. --- So, I hold you. Both hands at the soft latitude of your waist,the way you would carry a lightthrough a corridor with no wallscarefully,with your whole body leaning slightly toward. --- There are monsters in every lake.There is a creature in every chestthat wants to split the ribs and rise. Mine rose the day I saw you,tilting your glasses up with one finger,squinting at something small and bright.and I thought: This is the most fragile and irreplaceable thing,I have ever been allowed to stand beside.Handle her like the last good light of an afternoonyou cannot photographand cannot keepand cannot stopstanding in. -- You are porcelain.You are the kept thing.You are the cup my grandmother never let us useset now in the middle of the table,full of something living,full of something I would crawl acrossevery cold floor in Oregon to reach. I will not drop you.I will not drop you.I will hold the curve of you,like a psalm I finally understand. not with the grip of a man who is afraid,but with the hands of a man,who knows exactly what he is holding.

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