Confluence

I.

The wind was brisk. A red-tailed hawk appeared string-hung from the sky, almost perfectly still in space: summed velocity, loft, momentum. Flight is in its way a ceaseless falling and failing the earth. But what I thought of was the time we were on the river that summer and how I’d stripped naked, the current faster than I thought and to keep floating in place, I rowed one-armed, spinning in the eddy my body made, watching the clouds. I thought of how cold the water was, how hot the rocks were in the sun. Thought of how still the earth is even as its heart is burning. How you stood on the bank looking at me, how my skin shone blood-brown, a branch heavy with fruit. I could have been a tree, a riverstone, the river’s meniscus ribboned in that current. How the river gave as I walked back toward you, how you gave as I touched you, how we were a moment’s confluence. How I was a child of that earth, believing nothing but what could be touched, born of burning, burning again, a zealot returned.

II.

I only wanted to marry your sentences. My legs swung from the bed to the hardwood, announced a leaving. I was already on the stair when you asked: Can’t you stay until the sun comes up? I shook my head with my fist on the knob: It’s snowing out; the sun’s not coming. The sky fell with a hiss, and I circled the block three times before I could reach escape velocity, barreling toward home. Leaving in the snow means the words won’t carry. The angels gathering on all sides, pulling the sky tight. The sky flashed her terrible icy teeth, swallowed those words like god-stones. At thirty-two degrees, water knows it is time to grow arms, ruin toward the earth tight as fists, defiant empty pages. It understands a departure; there are boundaries.