I slept in your shirt last night, over-sized and forgotten at the bottom of a pile of long-washed clothes haphazardly shoved into a closet with half-broken hinges.
Every year you sail further away from me; suddenly we are on either sides of a body of water I know you will not swim. I have shorelines to match your cliffsides, a time when your life was tucked into me; somewhere along the way an ocean got between us. You left or I left or the world shifted beneath our feet, a greater force commanding us apart and we could not refuse.
There are days, in this small room, when I pray for your reaching hands to find me despite all the space between - earth becoming earth becoming earth until it fades into blackness. In my mind you are somewhere else, a king perhaps or a man of God, finally. I know you are reaching for greater things.
I still have your shirt crumpled in a fist on the bed. In this sea, stripes of white gauze the ruled blue, the bundled cloth an anchor without purpose; under this water I've never been afraid of the storm. Cast iron, bought not borrowed, not given never owned. In your absence, another, a curtain, a shadow-
I was always yours without declaration, never claimed or taken, a shirt for a white flag, flag fluttering in surrender.
There are days, in this small room, when I pray for your reaching hands to find me despite all the space between - earth becoming earth becoming earth until it fades into blackness. In my mind you are somewhere else, a king perhaps or a man of God, finally. I know you are reaching for greater things.
I still have your shirt crumpled in a fist on the bed. In this sea, stripes of white gauze the ruled blue, the bundled cloth an anchor without purpose; under this water I've never been afraid of the storm. Cast iron, bought not borrowed, not given never owned. In your absence, another, a curtain, a shadow-
I was always yours without declaration, never claimed or taken, a shirt for a white flag, flag fluttering in surrender.
