The Unfurling

Days passed by similarly

until I started seeing differences again,

in browner water filters,

spoons of cinnamon. It was an unclenching of jaw,

a slow unsquinting at any sign of sun.

Until I could encounter someone else

with your name & feel the same calm

I had moments before our meeting.

An unfurling, an opening, a delicate

unraveling of wind.

I thought I had outlived it,

the waiting, that now I serviced light

& its offerings. That the wanting

moon you made of me had finally stopped

moving & settled, & this was it, then,

this was the after: a clearing crusted

with crushed leaves, a gap between

trees & their branches so big that I could spot

a hint of sky, the first & only beautiful

blue thing I’d ever really seen.

The color in a context so unreal to me

that I came back home, dying

to be in the before again, the times

when I was recognizably blue, as in sad, as in down,

as in I didn’t know the end yet & thought

the inevitable was still uncertain,

that I was petaled & perennial,

& it was summer forever like every song you hate

& I had not yet written your name on a slip of paper

& dropped it in tea & drank.