the study of yr body and it’s imprints

lilacs that open like thumbs; opening the night to reveal the soft plum meat of the cut on your finger, love is the city, the sweetness of sleep in the summer; blue skirting the edges of a bruise gentle like a winter pond; it is a mosquito bite, it is a puddle, small: it is the knife that slices the mango- love is small but then it breathes and is suddenly great, and when you ask it what it is doing, it replies, "only breathing" and there — behind the breathing i can see the color of your eyes, the kind of colors we can’t recognize and it’s possible we never will, as the flowers petal, the stamens ripen, letting the pollen down into the warm parts of our hearts and your fingers pulling out the red on the soft plum core of the cut on your finger. if i counted the rings of the trees as if they were veins in your arms or bodies in the ground or leaves finally touching the soil after such a long war with the wind, and i continue to forge into your cavity, searching its length, the angle of the space between your knees; from your ankles to your hipbones, to the greenest ink traced out onto your muscles. the bleached skin stretched over the rotating bones of a pelvis, the body on axis, in stasis. my legs with your legs, my mouth with your mouth, the blue edges of a winter pond. and sometimes i can be so brave i even stretch my legs and begin walking the perimeter of your wounds. i am the color of a newborn and my history is as grey as factory buildings,  but still i stretch my arms and touch the architecture of your spine and breath my heart out into the crease of your elbow, as if it were smoke.