i look at you and i disappear

You hold my hand as it shakes a little,
Hovering in front of me like a blind man’s feelers

We’re walking into land I don’t know
Cause love has never
Held my hand for that long before

And I stumble a little as I go
Like my uncle shuddered
When he turned older than his parents ever got
- He pales and fidgets as he says is,
Eyes darting upwards to seek the shadow of a hanging sword

You pluck at my first white hairs
That grow like the timid early crocus, hidden in the lawn
Daring only to bare a tongue’s tip of purple 

And maybe first white hairs
Is old enough,
Bold enough a season
To look at the underlying whisper,
That I speak ashamed as it reveals itself to me

“I guess I don’t believe 
that love stays, really.”

I embrace flamboyant beasts in my bed
Never believing any of us will see tomorrow

and certainly not the whims of winged eros,
known to me only as stolen seasons
between migratory birds

but this love
was never made of wind and feathers,
not even fresh dew on red grapes
Anymore

We crushed those underfoot many a storms ago
and the earth lapped it up with a dreaming tongue,
held it in her belly till its red sun resurfaced in a glowing strong wine
Thick as blood 
robust as rose thorn.

a hundred poems later
It tastes exactly 
Like the miracle of first-day mad-honey
But the smiles on our faces
Sit in well-oiled creases that have also seen the bridge
And the ready hand
with a lit match.

i toast to that first glance 
still here two years later

“i look at you and I disappear”