Ten thousand words of longing

but the poem remains unsent.

I am careful so not to grip a breath from out of me; I am careful
not to slip loose a tie.

Whatever could amount to such unraveling I shan’t
give an inch. The tide comes at dawn,

I can’t be with it. Not until you give a cry.

The birds accumulate like snowflakes
upon my front porch,

resting their wings horizontal like moths in the dew.

The steady climb of my eyes, the bending
of my chest,

opens me as a box lid being lifted,
my hinges crinkling.

You are rust on my silver chain, a sliver
running through;

wine cannot give me
what you have taken,

what you have withheld,
dark, unsaid prayers in the night.

The shrillness of the ache, the breakage, the chasm
that splits still, crashes, and sighs;

it is a fluttery kind of perdition of the heart,

nonetheless, we shan’t ever cry.

For we are cold
as the five a.m. rime.