Axis

Altitude demands a catch in the lungs.
Thin air thinning love.
Two bodies moving through a borrowed season.
Chests rising. Chests falling.
Chests caving within reason.

The valley swallows the sounds within it.
To hope for disruption, then refuse to leave it.

To map the pulse at the base of a throat.
To feel a shoulder turning into my own.
To hear your words softly spoke,
And watch the mountains turning cold.

Two sets of hands. Two sets of eyes.
Two sets of clouds passing by.
Breathing in, out; open skies,
With no tomorrow left to hold.

A glance that has the weight of confession.
A quiet yielding to the stream of obsession.
The realization that the air is finite,
Before the first touch on a summer night.

To point out the brushstrokes to the painter.
To watch the afternoon grow fainter.
A patio facing the quiet cemetery.
Not a single name etched in for the temporary.

Say the word summer and mean a borrowed weather.
Say mountain and mean we breathed together.
Say afternoon and mean a thing that is dying.
Say tomorrow and mean a knot untying.

The sky bruises itself purple against the spine.
A shiver building at the base of mine.
It is a rare thing to be so easily aligned—
Harder to watch the last minutes of the evening;
To feel the axis of the season.

Some things are designed to leave no trace.
Some things are perfect in a fleeting space.

There is mercy in the temporary.
Grace in a slow dissolve.
Circumstantial does not mean design was not involved.

The refusal to take a souvenir.
The landscape slowly disappears.
The light buried exactly here.