almost a love poem

Sleep is one sixtieth of death

There are seven things I do not understand about you:
the way your lips move when you read,
the edge your laughter has,
how the scent of watermelon makes you sick,
why you never look away,
who you think of, when your eyes go distant,
the strand of hair that always sticks straight up,
why your arm curls around mine.

There are others, but those are the important ones
that make me tap my head
against the bricks drawn in crayon
on the waxpaper wall that flutters between us.

I miss them, even so,
when I lay,
sheets tangled and furrowed between us like mountains,
watching you in streetlights paled through half-drawn blinds
and listening to the hiss and snuff of your breath,
the only sign that your flesh,
folded in on itself,
is not a discarded aluminum can
but still, somewhere,
holds a drop of self.

I want to reach out
over canyons of hundred-count cotton
to twine our arms again
and draw your enigmas back
to where I can see them,
indistinct circles of scarlet, fuzzy squares of ochre and aquamarine,
through that never-quite-clear barrier.

The clock blinks blood.
I roll over,
sheltering behind a newly-raised range of foothills
from the night-body that breathes in patterns
too easily understood
to be yours.