"the branch"

You and I struck up so fast
conversation and bond
the sand on the beach beneath
our bare feet, was fused to glass

you can still see our naked pads
and toes, our deeply wet
and planted heels, unsuspecting

of all we now never will

unknow.

Especially how it felt
and still feels.

We were taken up into air
bright sky, into blue
like a self-abduction stunt,
the aliens we always were
to ourselves, in each other

had found some one,

impossibly not
to be true.

As we’ve somehow flown
from a side-by-side
blaze, our courses
they drew, drifting further
by burning white-hot degrees,

in a pure and certain agreement

by angles too tiny to note
at the time, we strayed

like the sundered and sundering
parts of one bolt. We know now

we’ll cleave the sky, but
separately, somehow. We could never

try. It was effortless play
from the first. And so,
here we hang just far apart
enough to hurt. To know
how we came

so close. And finally, grasping
never again to reach, to touch

with only a sense
- anastomosis, like a network
of phantom limbs - all your arms
holding me, all my arms

around you, slipping free
in every memory, growing
frantic in knowing

how inescapably we have flown
so free.

and still
going