Yield
An undoing
Tan pools like warm honey in the bowl of your lower back Curls descend, dark as the Turkish coffee you pour for us daily Curls unfurl on shoulders spattered with freckles and smudged with hickies My mouth a leech on you, affixed From your bed I watch you work Unwashed and indolent, I’m beguiled by the molasses of your voice, by how your knowledge spreads to the kids you teach like maple syrup leaks across the pancakes you flip for me Later on the beach, the sun melts into the water – butter puddling or egg yolk oozing while we talk about your chickens: their egg song heralding their first lay, as if in homage to that which is being born between us Or what each of us is spilling into the other Such porous beings we are Later on the beach, the sun, setting, is, I tell you, astrologically, the dissolving of the I into the You, cosmos and Earth melding the discovery of and the ceding to others, or a softening, at least It’s the same as when we dance, body boundaries deliquescing Dancing we are one but then also more than two The maths breaks down We are everyone and no one, molecules spinning dervish-like, tumbling and crashing into one another over and over, our egos, our identities dissipating into space like the smoke we exhale On beaches, on piers and on water, semi-religiously I photograph our dissolution, the way our shadows thrown by the sinking sun clump and mass as our bodies collapse into each other It’s a mutual engulfing, a new amorphousness We are something both less and more than ourselves