sea level
I think about the ways you know my face, how the corners of my mouth sprout a grin that draws my cheeks up under the smooth shade of my forehead
how my lips thin in discomfort before a stiff neck is tugged off in a wandering gaze, the tiny trembles of worry in the soft skin under my eyelashes, the dip in my jowls when an old sadness scales the perimeter, how my blue-grey irises still before they fly wide in excitement, or slip a quiet tear, how the arbor of my features crests in hard sobs so similar to the young tremors of buoyant giggles, how my chin climbs the empty space between us to invite you closer
I will never know my own face the way you know it, the landscape of its delicate geometry, the textured tones of its shape shifting
but a face is only a small cove on the meandering coast line of a life, one cut of current in a wild bloom of marshes, deltas and tributaries, twining gravity and suspension, one surface crater of clustering nebulae stomping through dark matter
did you know the air around you has weight, and it presses against everything it touches, this weight, called atmospheric pressure, can become too low and the vacuum of space will pull all the air out of your lungs, if it’s too high your respiratory muscles can no longer accomplish the feat of inhales and exhales
a body is a holographic convolution, a chaos realm of reforming in ancestral mixed media, in swells of microscopic lessons beyond creation or destruction, beyond separateness or interconnection
no matter how many minutes we pass in the prism of each there’s daylight, no matter how many translucent spoonfuls of truth I mine from the depths of the hunger inside to offer to our communion you will only taste a fractal of the cosmos tethered beneath the net of my skin
because I will only ever cup a morsel of the void, breaking waves and particles in discernible codes of becoming known to myself
but what is there to do with the watershed of heartbeats we’ve been given other than cover the soft mountain of our infinite inside with our own humming ears
