Cedar (My Stranger)

Sweetness, I was your blank. I named myself in the solitude of your proof. Shadow yellowed the place of the mother who could give voice to the bitter dream of color. Proverbial amnesia; in remembering, love was childless. Your whisper cloaked the heat above my scratch. I knew you kissed nothing before I knew you would kiss nothing. I stared into the blue innocence of the cedar. Waterburn. Angel’s tongs. Yesterday flayed the ocean. A gray skein muffled throats of blue adorning the witness of nowhere. White bruised; gray held its breath of blue; blue inhaled green. Rosettes, mouthless then thickening, ceded the winter on their brows to green. I pressed my thumb against the sunlight peppering the dark green hatches. Green loaded the countenance of a wound beyond pain. Our touch casted another green on the dark. Dusk of gutted green washed over the limbs heaving their shoulders away from the stolid shadows. No one had a name. Thus, pure kiss. Darkness peeled the column of dusk inside. Blackened clouds and torn muscles of shade kneeled on the soil. Love, a memory in needles: when skin was asked, “Who are you?” Over there. I was over there.