Something to Remember Me By

Something to Remember Me By

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." --T.S. Elliot

I waited for you, each moment like holding my breath -
each breath fluttering from me a startled bird returning to its flock.
I've seen these moments take wing and migrate far from my reach
and all the little rituals of my day
the small sigils that mark the paths i have taken or yet to take
are incremental parts of the numberless ways, the numberless breaths, that i have spent looking for you.
If you come you may yet rest your hand against the window pane and feel the warmth from my startled breaths, each longing to return.
If you return, you may yet see the small flocks of trifles and trinkets which make up the well of all my memories of you:
this pebble from that beach
the blurry Polaroids of half dark rooms and dim candles
old ticket stubs and crumpled receipts for places to go and things to eat

I expect i have forgotten you as i forget the exact whorls of my finger prints each time i look away.
I breath out and the next little bird insists i know you in my heart.
My heart aches with the breath i hold, rusts and turns over in its sleeping wait.
my vision is cloudy, fogging this window, and the shape of you is my vision -
an elusive cloud, fading even as it is transgressing the sky.
I concentrate amid the depths of this flotsam and you become essential:
warmth rising up from the ground beneath me
the parabolic trajectory of flight
the wind pushing a hurricane up river
wind in my hair and light on my face and i breath out again
my breath fogs the glass and flutters the candles of my Polaroids
where you are tonight, there too shall i be.