Air

NASA : Yukon Territory

I. visibility

I still see you in the shape of

your clarity, moving with such 

strange speed, almost like light

yet slow as our hearts 

beating underwater

Running in a layer beyond 

this fake backdrop painting

where you can't be seen but 

where your true body emerges,

your skin, your hair, your breath

somehow more real, more 

whole, more urgent and alive

Yet it's all unsayable—

—you said you speak my language

but I don't even have the words to bridge

this chasm you know nothing of 

crossing or even falling into

Do you know it's all there, all 
free for the taking, your riches, 
your weapons of song, of story—

this great divide that waits for you to

see its vast space that invites us to play

and revel in its air, compels our very

movement, that is even joy—

Joy that is the unspoken word

that is the forbidden saying

that is the code to the passage

where the scrolls enfold secrets

that lead to the caves no one's

yet discovered—

II. invisibility

There's a holiness that descends

when you step into a dark place

untouched since creation. Its quiet

ambushes your being and you know

the ground is a threshold you

can't escape unchanged—

—and the voice you longed to hear

all your life doesn't come from behind,

yet suddenly you know this language

and it knows you. All your words

annihilated and remade.

This is why we understand nothing

now. Why you look at me and feel

the ache of waste, why what I see I 

can't say or pull out of the soil of this

field I bought with everything  I owned. 
We can't bring ourselves to name it

for fear of looking down and finding we've 

been walking blind through air all along.

If this is all there is, then why do I

see how all of what you show the world

is just crackling bark, and the loss of it

doesn't mean death as you think?

Why do I see the true skin of what

could grow around the mass of you,

smooth and firm and fitting the whole of

your layered years, you instead like an aspen

with someone sitting in your shade, writing

letters on the substance of what you shed? 

And yes, why do I still believe

that faithful sun will rise tomorrow

when this cave I've slept in my

whole life has told me it's all a lie?

As a child, I saw it: 
why do they say 
that we can't see air
when air is what 
makes us seen?

You tell me.
I know you
still are there.