Take Me In

Take Me In

Maybe,
I just wanted you to take my face
in your hands and say
I’ll hold you until everything is ok.

When there’s nothing in my eyes
for you to crawl in bed with me and hold me,
so I won’t need heroin, valium, or alcohol.

I was a fist closed, tight,
and I just wanted your hand in mine tonight,
letting our lifelines touch.

making me aware that I have purpose.
When I came home broken from
divorce and being held up at gunpoint,

I wanted you to lay down beside me
and tell me about the cherry farms that line highway north,
about the little hill behind the hill in the spring.

that will never be so perfect again, as
when we slid down that hill
on those cardboard cutouts we made

eating berries that will never taste so sweet.
About evenings with star dust and a moon so full and blue
it almost seemed shy by contrast to the cosmic glory it wears.

I lay here and imagine the noise my life would have made.
Part of loss is coming to terms with that silence.

I can make a poem out of anything,
I want to reach out to you and say,
but putting my head on your shoulder as we sit on this dock,
allowing myself cry for all that I’ve lost-
that is what I need. I need you to light me from the inside.

I thought I had so much longing, I think staring at the moon,
but that just feels stupid compared to how much longing I have
for human touch, someone to just take me in their arms
and stay until I am able to say my own name again.

I have my voice. That seems to be a fixture in me,
but learning how to want, to hope, to pray,
to lean on something when heart has erupted like Saint Helens.
That is something I have yet to know.

When I come home,
unfold the sheets and crawl in with me.
We have so little time
to do what we must:
breathe for each other,
when we simply cannot.