Upon Swallows

a tender rearrangement of what is missing,

Buy me a ring that will turn my finger green so I can imagine our love is a forest – because I wanna get lost in you. And I swear I grew like a flower every hour of the fifty years I was with you – and that’s not to say we didn’t have bad days. But when morning came, you were laughing. Yeah, there were times we were both half-in and half out the door but I never needed more than the stars of your grin to lead me home. For fifty years, you were my favorite poem and I’d read you every night knowing I might never understand every word but that’s okay – ‘cause the lines of you were the closest thing to holy I’d ever heard. You’d say, “This kind of love has to be a verb.” We are paint on a slick canvas – it’s gonna take a whole lot to stick but if we do, we’ll be a masterpiece. On nights you couldn’t sleep, I’d lay awake for hours counting sheep for you and you would rewrite the rhythm of my heartbeat with the way you held me in the morning, resting your head on my chest and I swear my breath turned silver the day your hair did, like I swore marigolds grew in the folds of my eyelids the first time I saw you and they bloomed the first time I watched you dance to the tune of our kitchen kettle in our living room in a world that could have left us hard as metal, we were soft as nostalgia together. For fifty years, we feathered wings too wide to be prey and we flew through days strong and through days fragile as sand-castles at high tide and you would fold your love into an origami firefly and you’d throw it through my passageways until all my hidden chambers were filled with lanterns, now, every trap door, every pore of my heart is open because of you – because of us.

Andrea Gibson (via yunzi)

(via clavicola)