To You Again

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.

Copyright Credit: Mary Szybist, "To You Again" from Incarnadine. Copyright © 2013 by Mary Szybist.  Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press. www.graywolfpress.org
Source: Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013)