the Mountain

You will never be anything other than a pair of mountains; a valley, a grassy knoll, the tangled collection of tree roots, just under the surface of your skin.  Moss, but not green, and logs without bark.  A canal, an abandoned abalone shell, ten or twenty of those clicked on at the ends.  Maybe some spiderwebs, wet, catching golden morning light, instead of your hair.  Treeless hills, the kind we don’t have here, ones fine with green grass.  Maybe a rock can stand in for the birthmark near the crease of your buttocks.  Maybe a little pool of water, with mosquitoes breeding — you’ve got to have the germs somewhere.

I can be the water.  That doesn’t make sense.  If you’re a grassy knoll I’ve got to be one too.  Or I’ve got to be fallen tree if you’re a valley, or a fly so the spider can wrap me in a cocoon of you.  Even if I have to die; you can suck me dry.  But you’re already the web, or at least your hair is.

When I see you, you will be a pair of mountains, a valley, a grassy knoll, a tangled collection of tree roots.  The last thing I will see is skin instead of dirt, your waist instead of the dipping slip-down of hillocks, eyes instead of doves.  I won’t see anything I’m allowed to love.  Or, at least, anything that can love me back.

Dear, you’re the mountain.

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[this was posted on my blog back in June, and I read it at The Good Ship in Kilburn on July 7th]

~ by yearzerowriters on August 20, 2010.