lying purple
All day you lay on my heart like a heavy green cloud over those wanton plains:
Stretched out in a yawn of arms that hold all the living things that run
In gold and green and a million oranges, splattered with blues
you would not imagine live in plains.
But they do, like grasshoppers the blues jump up covering your pant legs
And the wind keeps pulling your breath away. It pulls it from your chest
as though it could not breathe without your lungs to borrow.
I borrow your lungs on days like today, when you lay on my chest like a great cloud:
The weight of your rain, holding, holding…
I see it, I smell it: ozone lingering like a purple line behind my eyes.
The yellows are heavy with seeds, waiting to fall, and yet your rain holds.
Holds. Holds back… flying slowly over the arms stretched out to you.
The Sunflowers lean and look up at you, leaning one against another like small children,
shoulder to shoulder, holding one another down from flying off the earth
as they lay watching the cloud people fly.
You are not a cloud person, yet you linger up there, holding onto your rain.
Your paint all stowed in the heavy cans, and I can see your arms become thick as sailing ropes with
every gust you carry that paint…
And I see them when they start to tire, loosening in the constant wind.
Spill that great paint, heart and apple red.
We are all waiting.
