Letter to Us, Younger

Ready to fly, my heart has been unbuckling

for a long time, waiting. When you finally

arrive, we are given: extra room under the sky,

a thousand days of spring, the ability to read

the wind, what we see tomorrow becoming.

And I know it’s a slippery slope—how things

become other things, digging in our heels

to slow erosion. Our mouths purple, gurgling

goodbyes, still unwritten. Like corn, shuck shuck

shucking, the way we must unglove ourselves, pry

loose what’s under the skin, hoping to like

what we find, learning to love. Naked, bared out

in full color, we make casts of each other

to remember. A shifting gradient, the low cloud

rolling in, grating the tops of trees—I note the way

machines heat, as if angry. This is what crashed it,

too, I know—this is what crashed us. We take

good scraps where we can find them—asking

questions of the water, clouds pressing down,

small envelope of sky, disappearing. Scraping

my thin, pancake heart—unable to beat, weak

from all that trying—flattened out, stretched

and pulled every inch, every which way—that

final attempt. The sacred question: how much

can we love, before it hurts?