I Beg For a Word

 

I beg for a word to imagine
your sleeping features by.
It nearly comes like a sudden kiss,
but then we couldn't touch.

The infant moon felt us down the length
of the street, heard us walking up town.
We could have hurried into the rain

or spoken some magic word,
but we fell into the void.

Returning through the woods without shadows,
a day the light filled all its space the same,

we could have stopped and stripped
clouds off the sky, but we didn't.
We moved ahead instead in silence,
though there was no place to arrive.

Together might have meant a discreet engagement
or a faithful reckoning with the normal mode,
but we made it have nothing to name.

We made it spell a foreign
noun, an empty verb.

You left like your time was gone, your meter up.
You flew like a black and red bird off the roof.