To You Again by Mary Szybist

11/03/2014 20:32
Again this morning my eyes woke up too close
to your eyes,
 
their almost green orbs
too heavy-lidded to really look back.
 
To wake up next to you
is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you
 
to see you.
But I do look. So when you come to me
 
in your opulent sadness, I see
you do not want me
 
to unbutton you
so I cannot do the one thing
 
I can do.
Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk
 
and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase
away from me. Already it is years
 
of you a staircase
away from me. To be near you
 
and not near you
is ordinary.
 
You
are ordinary.
 
Still, how many afternoons have I spent
peeling blue paint from
 
our porch steps, peering above
hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first
 
glimpse of you. How many hours under
the overgrown, pink Camillas, thinking
 
the color was wrong for you, thinking
you'd appear
 
after my next
blink.
 
Soon you'll come down the stairs
to tell me something. And I'll say,
 
okay. Okay. I'll say it
like that, say it just like
 
that, I'll go on being
your never-enough.
 
It's not the best in you
I long for. It's when you're noteless,
 
numb at the ends of my fingers, all is
all. I say it is.
 

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