You tied me a swing
Off a planet's thin ring,
Glacial bangle of wintery wonderful white.
You visit me there
Til' you run out of air,
And I'm left sipping space in perpetual night.
The moons rumble on
And the clockwork of dawn
Is too heavy to hold back for long and I go.
I go to my charts
Of vast systems, their parts
And orbits and ruptures and forces that flow.
I seek places to sit
See to the requisite
Of charting and placing, arranging and such.
But I have found no place
In the charters of space
That could boast to my senses of anything much
Similar to your swing.
It's a worrisome thing.
No such place can be found in this sharp universe.
I travel without form,
So what holds the odd, warm
Memory of your skin and your whisper-words, curse
You and your sweet tricks..
You'd trap me in a fix-
A fixation on your swings, your stories. And you.
Dallying on the brink,
It scares me to think
Of what in me's so captured by all that you do.
I crawl, always, back
To the swing in the black
That hangs innocent off a planet's icy belt.
Even if you don't come
Climbing down the ropes from
Your homeworld's far surface, with mountains like welts
And lakes like teardrops,
And 'til my hope stops
Insisting you'll find me, surprise me just this once,
My stardusty toes
Dangle above rows
Upon rows of star clusters. These lost little hunts
Leave me ever dry.
And weary of eye.
And longing twice as fiercely, hoping half as hard.
Oh, what do I miss?
The torture? The bliss?
The waiting? The wanting? The dignity marred?
How anxious I'm made
By promise you trade
For promise of my own, to come back for more meeting.
I confess: the thought
That really it's not
Such an unfair bargain for your company, fleeting
As it may be
To one ageless as me,
Has entered my troubled, bright mind, made it storm.
But these storms abate
When gone is the wait
And again you visit me, with voice low and warm.
With fingers upon
My chin. Worry gone
And replaced by your laughter, your boots beside my
Transparent feet, bare.
Your hands in my hair,
Marveling just as your clever and wandering eyes.
Breathless, I greet you.
I don't need breath, true,
But you make me want to and you make me shiver.
Your hello's, they change
Each time. And they range
From 'you're lovely, my rover' to 'oh, starlight-giver,
I missed you, my oddity,
My divine commodity,
My wisher and seeker and high queen of all worlds.'
I never show it
(Still, you somehow know it),
But to me your speech murders. It's poison soaked pearls
That burn and progress,
That nevertheless
I dive for and drown for and drink in like a slave.
Have you made me this?
Do I now subsist
Only on the few beautiful words that you gave
To me on my swing?
To my pride I cling
And I cannot bear to ask if my fears are not far
From the truth. I don't
Dare, I simply won't.
And I smile serenely to mask the new scars
Left by the black claws
Of my own questions' cause
In my throat as it burns to spill out to the skies
A long silenced song
Of everything wrong
With my hunts and my hello's and all my neat lies.
