after Olivia Gatwood
I will admit: I was scared of you at first.
Swallowed you down and stood still in the kitchen,
waiting. As if the poison would leech out instantly and
spread thick through my blood like cement.
It took almost a week for me to notice how the room
filled with the sweet of you when you bounced
into my hand. That I could chew you or melt
you into water and drink you like Ribena.
The taste of blackcurrant covering
the clinical foul of all the other pills.
I will admit more: what scared me most
was your name and what you could do with it.
How you’d roll me flat like pasta dough.
Take what I know and replace it with nothing.
Maybe I would not write anymore.
Maybe the hollow of me would be unfillable.
But no, thank God, I had you all wrong.
You came in and did the dishes.
Drove me to the beach. Put the pen in my hand.
You changed something ineffable,
which is the worst thing to say in a poem,
but it’s true. You didn’t take or give, lessen or expand.
You made me solid: when I put my hand to the windows,
my fingertips left their spidery smudge.
It was in the late heat of summer that I proclaimed it.
Spoke of us aloud and made it real.
Brought you to family dinner.
Grieved all the wasted time before you.
You, who blurred the rest of them to one.
Who erased entire names from my vocabulary.
We took so long to find each other.
Which is to say, I tried everything else.
I tried everything else and then,
finally, you.