You rescued me, my love

It was the memory of me, not the truth of me

I drowned, I died, I lost myself in the salt of the sea

I died with you, I drowned with you, I lost myself, same as you

Sometimes I think the days spent wallowing in memory,

Seeking you—those days scraped away the old flesh of me,

Scooped hollow the last of who I was,

Carved out of me the selfish creature I used to be

Love, love, love—I was hollowed out, too, you know,

Left breathless, sightless, soulless

Who taught you to breathe again?

Who taught you to see again?

Who returned your soul to you?

Who filled you again? Was it me?

No, it wasn’t you, it couldn’t be you;

That was the lesson all along:

I needed to be me without you before I could be me with you

Me without you, you without me, us without him—

It’s a tangled web of need and sorrow

Not tangled, only interwoven; not a web, but a tapestry

If we are a tapestry, then you are my warp, and my weft

And you are the thread, and the image in the yarn,

and she is the frame of the loom, and the shuttle weaving it all together

I dreamed of you, my love, when I was a shell of a thing,

without memory or awareness or anything at inside me but fragments of you

I felt those dreams, I tasted them,

I followed them across the Sea;

I followed the skein of your dreams, the flavor of them

What did you see, what did you feel, what did you taste?

You, all that is you—the scent of you,

the scrape of your stubble across my skin,

the press of your lips on mine, your breath on my flesh

I dreamed of your eyes, the love in them, the shudder in your voice

I dreamed of moments in the sun,

Hours under the moon, and your whisper as you love me

It was never a whisper, my love, but a shout—

a barbaric yawp, in the words of Whitman

It was more than that, so much more

It was a song, sung in the shadows, in the silver of the moon,

in the instants between quavering breaths

We are a poem, my love

Then you are my stanza, and my refrain

The lyrics imprinted on my soul

The flavor of words as they sparkle on your tongue,

as they flow from your pen,

gyrating in your mind

they are like the high from a drug

The way a song or a poem or a photograph or a play or a film

tolls within you, somehow, the way it strikes a chord,

resounding familiar,

echoing in some secret portion of your soul

Are we speaking of Love, or of OUR love?

Of Love, with the capital L, and of OUR love,

And of the love that moves this world,

The seed of prose and the source of poetry and the structure of who we are,

At the core of us

I still dream of you, even when you slumber beside me

I don’t “slumber”—I sleep, gracefully, and delicately

Even so, I dream of you; and I wake,

And there you are, real and perfect,

With love glowing from within you as if you are lit inside by a sun

That glow, that love—it is the fire you light inside me,

When you look at me as you do,

hungry, wild, possessive, and tender

The memory of you, rather than the truth of you, you said?

My love, they are the same—the truth of you and the memory of you,

to me, then, it was all I had,

and all I needed to find you in this wide world

And you rescued me, as much as I did you,

the truth of you and the memory of you

Put the pen down, my love, and drown with me

Drown IN you

Be my breath

Be my sight

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Always, my love

Always