Your eyes avoid me like orbiting moons.
You’re pulling back your hair,
and tucking behind your ears,
like tucking back a whirlwind,
or the tide across your years.
And then—
a real smile.
Suddenly, I would swim those riptides,
peeling back their luminous waves,
find you from your shell;
unfurl fiddlehead fern.
The line from your soft cheekbone,
across your breast,
across a shortened breath,
catches something not yet said
—catches the bird in the net,
the appaloosa that could run free—
but the curve from the corner
of your fresh freed smile
to the crease in your laughing eye,
sets the bone in the wing of the bird
and the saddle, cuts from the steed,
and the rising fury, from out of the sea.