Feeling Green

Experience is such a boring word.

How did I come to know myself through You?

The question devours its own tail since I was burning long before I learned

the word for fire.

Surely an absurd question;

for I am unaware of Your origins.

In this dark study, You light up my life with the light from a fisherman’s boat,

crossing black water at 3:00 a.m.,

the blond buff of hope that feels it must be now return I see,

and yet You are not the signal.

You are what it is like to receive one.

So, in turn, you turn the nadir of my sadness into a staircase,

and I go downstairs and run my fingers through his graying hair.

.

But what a savage gift it is to see something he’s not seeing.

How we can each put a different yet similar face to Christ

but can’t remember the face of the many Miss Larson’s who taught us

to not entirely trust our memories.

Yes, I don’t trust you entirely, and I love You more for that.

But I will gladly love You for giving me metaphor

to understand my melancholy,

a carapace I can drill through with fuck-it-all’s and body scans.

And yes, I know I will never know the true colors of a Maple.

.

Instead, You will give me green, that surging, urgent, inward green

that means nothing to the universe and everything to me.

The greenness. Not the light of physics. The greenness.

.

So I must ask You, finally,

the question I've been circling like a man who can't bring himself to knock:

Do you end?

Are you the flame or the burning?

The wave or the moving through?

When the body that carries you finally sets you down,

do you go out? Or do you go somewhere?

Take your time answering, my Love.

I'll be here, feeling the green, watching the boat cross the dark water, my fingers still warm from his hair.