Sitting here marking this vellum paper on the very spot

where I cut it open yesterday in this yearning to find you

on other days where you have scaled the length of words

and your watercolor stained blue love poems ignited the stars

A thousand roaming fingers delving into this loss of spirits

cupping and shaking up the silence, this reason to breathe,

to work, to languish and rhyme in circles the way I love you

into hands too weak to hold the nothing left with missing you

The colors saturated the ridges of my fingertips when I awoke

I had painted you in soft blues on the white of my inner thigh

it was a sky there then but had darkened to inky when you left

no moons or warm passages through to the other side of night

On the edge of my cushioned chair perched with restless limbs

wondering if there is any place left to look where you are not

a prison with golden creations and cut glass flowering sighs

to create fires beneath covers hiding the sparks that we fly