The Pulse

In the cathedral dark,
I turn toward your 
sleeping form
and drape my arm 
across your ribs
like a bridge 
I'm afraid to cross.

Your chest rises, falls,
steady as tides 
that know every curve
of sleeping sand. 
You pull me close,
your whisper warm 
against my hair:

I love you. 
Three words
that should settle 
like silt
in the riverbed 
of my chest,
but instead hang 
in the air

like smoke from 
a just-blown candle,
beautiful, untouchable,
already dissipating
before I can cup it 
in my palms.

I love you too, I say,
and the tears come unbidden,
salt springs from the well
of everything I cannot hold.

You know. You've always known
that I am the breath
that kills the flame,
the silence that follows

every declaration. How I watch
love rise like morning mist,
gorgeous in its leaving,
impossible to possess.

This is the wound I carry:
to trust is to extinguish,
to believe is to blow out
the very light I crave.

And still you stay, still you
whisper into my trembling,
still you offer your steady heart
as harbour for the storm

that only time might have
patience enough to calm.

Breathe with me, you say,
and for one moment
in the space between
exhale and inhale,

I almost believe
that some flames
burn deeper than breath,
that some love

is the body itself;
not the smoke,
not the light,
but the pulse

that holds us both.

Photo: Rob Wicks