Gracious, grows and blooms, the grass and bark, steadily but tense.
The linger of our toes drape the dew, and kiss the roots of apple trees beneath our soles.
Our lips soften with the sun and end in sunset,
on the rise and fall of our stomachs-
full of ginger tea and Japanese food.

Your blonde almost-curls bend quietly from the soft brushes of my fingertips,
to scalp,
to forehead,
and ears.
Drawing circles to mark an audible eternity.

The curve of your neck bows to me and reveals your face.
Bleached in the golden hour
you look at me.
You look at me with such knowing eyes that I dare not to pull away,
instead I plunge into deep, reassuring blue.

From knowing eyes, to knowing hands,
that buzz so sensitively around
the honey of my youth.
Pressing deeply against muscles
Lit by tea-lights.
Scented by incense-
we swallow into soil.

Your comfort,
only matched by the soft warm hug of earth,
reaches up to me to places I’d not yet touched.
With you I explore all of me,
A map, finally worthy of discovery.
Rain from sooted clouds, falls and drowns our becoming.
In the earth we grow together,
entangled like roots
from a rich sequoia tree.

On anniversaries of growth
we exchange Japan for Nepal,
a brave moment for us both.
Limbs and trunks meet us
and laugh, not foreseeing our decay.
One final night exchanged in tangled toes
followed by an inevitable fall
from the crown of redwood, awaits us.

We were further apart than once was seen,
you bathed in bark
I washed in green.

(Excerpt from ‘A Portrait of Air’, 2014).