we were once not inseparable
but hungry branches
of silk vine that flowered
coincident with arrival
of each other’s monarch
butterfly cloud
for which seasons were conveyances
for something that each needed
to migrate toward in the other
a place of cyclic return
exotic recognizable
but not home
(oh how we looked then
yes the nudes the ambush of pleasure
play become respect
& the eddying disputes
over my flower-of-an-hour
pronouncements
& your cooking rice
over separation logistics
before we made love
& the same hand folding over mine
that in sleep slipped away
on flights become distancing study
& talk of coffee as aphrodisia
or real estate for the proletariat --
weeds that muscled into the garden)
if perchance you are still aflutter
doing the dogged work
of seeing yourself aloft
then I send you polite updrafts
of gentle separations
from lovers children health
in a last kindness sparing you
my plainspeak of downward whorl
phrased in the pseudoscience of melancholy
but in intervals of descent
winging down to the resistances
of layered atmospheres
in the disjunct climates by which
we dignified our departures
yet coexist as vertices of a twilight
northward urge to stay aloft
or reunite in noctilucent dread
of vanishing milkweed
19 April 2012