feeling lonely on the beach an arm's length away from you,
i can't imagine there's anything out past the sky and sea,
and the place they meet--
a color i've never seen before,
all those dust motes in the mouth of the universe,
yawning open.

but you say
if i held a magnifying glass to a leaf,
i'd see a dozen tiny leaves within it,
and a hundred within each of them,
and on and on
all their little veins stretching out to sea and sky
like our hands in the darkness,
blind to the galaxies just under our dirty fingernails,
the matted roots of cities
clinging to the insides of our eyes.

if i could, i would hold a magnifying glass to my loneliness.

and would i see
just me, palm open, at the edge of the ocean,
trapped within my heart,
within my heart,
within my heart,
like russian dolls?

or would loneliness include us both
in its infinity?
the sea and sky and 2 near strangers--
just old friends still unfurling
like ferns opening outward,
a kaleidoscope of skin and blues
and truths curled closed.

even now i wonder how much i have known you
through your absences,
the way the sea has carved the earth and in these carvings lives its history.
they say that cold is an absence of heat.
and i wonder, is there any such thing as an absence of sky?
and what would it look like, magnified?

if i could, i would look at your life under a magnifying glass,
till the deserts are just grains of sand,
and in the grains of sand are deserts,
and your lover's skin
and my skin,
are all just lines that run like rivers
into spirals at the fingertips.

they say we've burned holes in the sky.
and i would
spin my thoughts into string
and weave a new sky
to wrap around us.
but then we'd never get the chance to see
its absence.
under a magnifying glass, it looks
just like
loneliness.

that break of blue just before the horizon.

Here is where time spirals in on itself,
and i have known you for a week,
and also for forever,
reaching for words that are not yet born,
their syllables uncurling open.

in the palm of your hand,
i trace the patterns of your silences,
the contours of your history,
like the shape of your body next to me,
or its absence,
like water,
blues
on the sand.

Labels: By Ana, for john fromeverywhere