Softer Than Leaves Falling

All I want is to be helpful.

But longing confuses the way.

Why call it longing when it is really lust?

Why write "the country of her sighs" when we mean to write moans?

I know that she needs me but I don't know what that means nor whether I can manage it.

Snow falling is a rarer comfort.

How vulnerable must we be in prose and to what end?

When I walk each morning I think of her.

When I write each day I think of her.

But I perceive her only through the dense web of my own needs and wants, my own lenses of desire.

I wish that were different but wishing does not make it so.

When I will to see her differently then the need to go to her becomes so strong it is as if I do not have a body or that the one I do have can be blown this way and that by the faintest wind.

I am scared of what the miles will say to me when I travel.

I am scared that when I arrive she will not open but only want to talk about ghazals and Rumi and A Course in Miracles.

Why is it I am unable to trust any but the most public communication modes?

I wish I could write her a letter in the swirling water of the river to which I wander every day, each word dissolving as soon as it is written, its frail intent carried out to sea.

How tired I am . . .

How long have I wished to sleep beside her - not the stolen sleep of the guilty - but the deep rest of the safely loved?

In my mind when I enter her I cry, I bite back tears, and we move in each other so gently, softer than leaves falling fall into the grass.

In a certain light it is all possible and then one shifts - a little - and no, it is not and never was.