i have fallen in love
with the pervasive feeling.
i put a name to this feeling
when i walked out the door into the garden
and the dusty, earthy scents of my childhood
i insist doesn’t exist
struck me in passing
like a brief glimpse
of a girl's sweater i knew,
the smell of a nameless flower, and coffee for the aeropress
and fabric softener
i think the word is loss,
or a loss in all things.
and so i’m enamored
with this blue light cast over everything
not from anywhere but as if borne from everything, not the atoms even but their constituent particles
and i’m told that it won’t be like this forever.
but how could it not be?
when i imagine it i don’t imagine a small thing
i can pluck out of my nervous system and discard like a
weeks-old dead flower from a secluded vase
but i envision the feeling instead as a blue sky.
vast, limitless
to explore and to look at and smile at in nice weather.
it arches over my home and my old schools and everywhere i’ve known and it is
one with all things,
its numinous shape fused into my spine.
i see this blue sky of loss in the sleet hitting a broken skylight
and in the faded persian carpet
and when i look inside a piano and see its delicate mechanisms;
its subtlety like an animal's body,
purring and chirping to me, with a personality i become fond of
and i try to imagine loving that sweater smell again
or being in love without thinking about this loss, but
instead i find myself deeply romantic with that same psychic form, that numinous thing.
so now i want to brush that blue sky's cheek and tell it that i trust it and love it and always have,
and for it to hold me so i can feel its warmth
in my lungs like a raincloud i’d swallowed.
i want for myself to touch my fingers to that feeling's hair
and for it to look me in the eyes
with its eyes exactly like mine
and gently smile.