Something beyond is bad enough to wake you, which wakes me. Groggy, half-blind, whipped to worry, we peer into the slipping blindspot at the horizon, blink through a sunrise aching with terrible cold. The haze of the corona is magnetic and we are paperclips, little malleable gizmoids of function lost. Few intelligible phrases for what’s swelling at the margins. A bleed out of maybe misted rain but all that’s come yet are the gales. Tarps on back porches play with the force of lift. A rapping hales from unknown origin. Is it worth shutting the windows this early? Not quick enough: out flees the sweetly stagnant bedroom air, without pageantry or promise to return. It’s so early still let’s just go back to sleep? Turning over and passing water back and forth as if the glass’s weight will pin us down. Naive, we are. No lulling anymore. An inverse gust is sucking us into vacancy, neither of us dressed, a sheen on your troubled skin unlike any satin I’ve seen. The fog lays its hand on you first.
Into that current and the last thing you hear is the first strand of my promise, dwindling through thick air slow and weary. The words are gulped down by cloud cover, a silent mandible with scary teeth. I chant it all again like a hex as I plunge for the window: you will not go without me into this upswell of season. I’ll be just as windbroken as you, spooned up and sublimated to be showered down, butchered over storm drains, icicled in a cold sea. Snow, somewhere, as if this were a fatal state. Surely we’ll see spring again, and what then? A part of you will fuse to the knees of a pollinator. A pixel of you will blaze a tropical pink, late late late in an evening’s retirement. Your neurology can’t dissipate so hopelessly, I won’t have it. There are planter boxes in your friends’ backyards. If a granule of me is seeded there, I promise you’ll be, too.