for you

My enthusiasm has been defined
by how the world in which i let it loose
has aged.
Context is a sticky wicket.

It was for some time adorable;
a paper cup of coffee
out east under shade cedars.
You were secure and counted the gulls;
they wet their beaks and feathers in the surf
collecting shells; unaware of your romantic
inventions, your love for them.

I picked at the rocks wrapped in brown and green seaweed
for the pearl i could not yet afford to velvet-box;
a thin black powerline scalloped from pole to pole
across the gulls, across the clouds, across the sky
into nothing.

Your voice was the whole world daring me to find some secret
no longer needing to be hid.
I watched what i estimated to be
about five hundred yellow bees
pull a hibiscus bloom
down to the grass with their enormous weight.
They danced like fingers through long, curling rivers of hair.

I stepped in the boat set nose first onto the beach.
Something like the sea air
makes my arms and hands electric. How could you resist?
But you put it there. How could i know?
what a dangerous game.
But by this time your wrists were circled
in bracelets of rosehip and thistle.
so what if i stole for you? So what if i lied for you?
It was our time to do these things
for we could never go back and do them again.

My voice these days draws longer air time
between the things i mean to say
and the wrinkled cellophane stalks of roses
from the road side florist dying in my frustrated arms.
I can still see the gulls when i look directly into
the topaz part of your eye. The iris you correct me.
But the beach inside now cleaned by time;
the hybiscus stand tall like trumpets and the powerline
scallops from pole to pole
projected on film across your sad face
into an obscurity of words

when all i ever wanted was to kiss you perfectly
just once
before i was figured out.