Aft/er
aft
er we've
(or should
i say
i'd)
made
love
i wanted to hold you, but you have bound up from our bed & are gone from my grasp well before i am sufficiently recomposed to open and clasp my arms, so i hold the thought of you
i have just shuddered, exploded myself, funneled liquid missled into your moistness, am still gasping, only partially aware, sight is fuzzy, my thoughts are louder than anything in the air, i'll be all right in a moment
i hear you running the shower in the hall bath, the morning water covering your nakedness where moments earlier i joyfully was
outside the open windows a crow caws in the near distance, two streets away a dog desultorily barks, the wind moves a few leaves
our floors are terrazzo in some rooms, light colored carpet in others, overhead fans, enough wall space to hang art and photographs, rooms full of comfortable places to read
music floats from the small system, most of the time you punch up billie holiday, etta james singing billie holiday, nina simone mournful as billie holiday, or grover washington interpreting pop tunes of his day like billie holiday did for hers, and those sounds wind softly through the house, gently seeking and unerringly finding the ear, the soul
every breath costs some amount of air, sometimes the breathing is painfully evident like the labor of inhaling while running three miles atop the levee five or six mornings out of the week, other times the dues is less obvious: like we can't enjoy our separate lives and simultaneously be together all the time, sometimes i like to read in the same room you are sitting in doing whatever you're doing, other times i'm far away, far, far, away
i could never have written a poem like this twenty years ago, not enough distance to look back and see that the horizon is not just an ever receding, unreachable horizontal line in front of me but also a lengthy, spherical curve that wraps behind, knotted by contraditions and smoothed by the resolution of holding what i can grasp and of letting go what i can't hold
—kalamu ya salaam