Abrazo
To hold is to lay open the chest to cold air
two heartbeats learning their names without language.
Before the first word, a body read another.
The dance was always the hold.
Two spines disagree gently, without letting go.
Arms know what hands don't.
The angle of your shoulder: a measurement I carry.
Distance is not safety,
only loneliness given a cold name.
Winter morning, frost on glass:
I trace where your hand once was.
Grief, an embrace with nowhere left to open.
Gravity is want.
Mass draws all other mass near
not compulsion, but the oldest fact of things:
that to have weight is to matter to the world.
The moon tends toward the tide.
This is different from having no choice.
Some bodies have learned to be afraid of opening.
This does not make the opening wrong.
It makes the learning necessary first.
Your shoulder, at last
not a sound that can be named,
all the weight, set down
in the one place that knows how to hold it.
The arms don't say it.
They do it again.
This is the oldest language
the one that was already speaking
before we knew we had begun.
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