Paige of Spring

Paige of Spring

First, Paige, your smile in the picture with the poem
has this strong sense of season. You can’t see behind your perfect face,
but there are surely tulips, the smell of early spring dirt,
and freshly thawed creeks like the ones I imagine you
watching salmon squiggle their bodies upstream.

You talk about trying to split. To be right in the moment
watching pink salmon with someone you want to be present with
and still longing to be fifty feet behind, so you could
watch the elements of sex bloom ahead of you.

I too have had to forgive myself for all the springs I never blossomed into.

Paige, I too have wanted to be multiplied. I would add,
I’ve longed to be added, subtracted, and divided too.
You wanted to be at every faucet in a city trying to dissolve your flesh
and all the scents, sins, touches, scars math adds to our bodies.
Were you trying to subtract the hours, the salmon, the light between your thighs,
you experienced that day down by the creek?

Was that love a salmon that found a way to drown itself?
You write, “Open skin is not open forever?” We clot, close,
skin when wounded. You write and smile in the language of spring,
but it’s impossible to stay in one season throughout life?
Is it possible our lives exist continuously in all seasons?

You say when saints die, they smell like a single flower,
but I’m tasting sarcasm in the scripture here just like you, Paige.
I agree how could something so holy choose just one scent to be permanently?
I think when a saint dies they would exude a separate scent
for every love that’s ever grown inside them.

It is hard to imagine anyone who has ever been mortal, including the holy,
to choose one scent among all the living perfumes to fill them forever.

To be honest, Paige, I can’t determine the most delicious of jams I ever spread across my, “I love you’s’ Even plain toast would tell you, ‘don’t bother.’
There are just too many seasons and ways to taste and spread love.