When the hush first sparks—
skin kindles skin,
a struck match in the midnight orchard;
sap races, petals burn, hunger sings in the bone.
Each heartbeat is a drum that forgets tomorrow.
In this bright furnace nothing exists but flame,
and even the flame forgets itself.

Then the music of weathering:
two currents curl into one river,
water tasting water, naming itself anew.
Morning’s hush fills the house like warm bread;
fingers trace a map across shoulders—
soft cartography of laughter, salt, and sleep.
Yet feelings, like tides, lean on the moon:
one silver change in the sky and they withdraw,
leaving bright shells that crack between bare feet.

The Hands Learn

When the tide withdraws, the hands learn truer speech than the mouth.

So the hands learn truer speech than the mouth.
They lift the roof beam,
gather the shattered glass,
teach the garden to dream in winter.
The pulse no longer begs for thunder;
it steadies into the simple rhythm of roofs that do not leak,
of chairs pulled close against the long wind.
Here, devotion is measured in how quietly
a door closes at midnight,
how surely a light is left burning.

And farther—beyond the orchard and the river—
wide night opens its immeasurable wings.
I know no country but this joining
where the border of “I” thins to breathable air,
and your palm on my chest beats inside my wrist,
and your lashes settle when my own eyes surrender to dream.
In that vastness, pulse answers pulse,
the way constellations borrow fire from the same black silk:
each spark fiercely itself, all sparks the same blaze.

Yet there arrives a season
when the most faithful act is distance:
to loosen the knot, step back from the blossoming tree
so its roots may drink unshadowed rain.
Care is a silent pilgrim—it walks whether watched or not.
I carry the thought of your morning across whole deserts of days,
weighing each step against the color of dawn.
If the path that guards your sunrise curves away from mine,
I will still kindle lanterns along it,
warming myself by their light even as I vanish beyond the dunes.

Still, the circle confounds—
what pours from the heart also fills it,
the well deeper for each bucket drawn.
To hold another’s becoming is to steady one’s own—
stone lending strength to stone in the arch.
And the great engine of the stars is nothing more
than this relentless giving:
fusion that spends itself into radiance,
glad of the heat, indifferent to applause.

When the storm of wanting passes,
what remains is the quiet mast that outlasts tempests—
wood seasoned by countless dawns,
firm enough to tie a sail to,
wise enough to release the rope
when the wind turns toward a farther shore.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman