If I Only Knew
If I Only Knew
Lord, if I only knew what you look like — the girl from my unfinished dreams,
the mother of all my unborn children and of all my buried morning gleams,
if I only knew the way your hair falls down your shoulders like rain across a field,
I'd write about your eyes all night until both time and line would melt and yield.
If I only knew what your smile looks like — that smile I have never seen,
I'd describe it with every single word my mind has ever known or been,
I'd use every melody that sleeps inside me like rivers without a bed,
just to paint you in my mind with a precision both sacred and delicate instead.
I'm good at one thing only — putting pain inside a rhyme like a cage,
turning waiting into verses and verses into the only proof I'm alive on this page,
and still I paint you — you whom I have never once laid eyes upon —
like a light that hasn't walked through my door yet — but that I'm waiting on.
I die a little every day inside this waiting like a flower caught in frost,
the paradox is that I'm dying for someone who doesn't know what it has cost,
and maybe I will die without ever knowing your face, your name, your sign,
like a poet who wrote about the ocean his whole life without seeing a single pine.
My drafts about love will stay forever without meaning and without a name to claim,
letters sent to an address that doesn't exist on any calendar's frame,
and still I keep on writing — because in writing I call you out of nothing and the void,
I birth you out of words the way God built the world from a single sound deployed.
If I only knew — oh Lord, if I only knew the color of your eyes —
I'd rebuild the entire universe from that color like the valley's first sunrise,
but I know nothing and it's from this nothing that I love you hardest and most true,
for the purest love of all is the love for someone who is not yet mine — and yet I write for you.
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