All Paths Lead to You

To sweeten you with these two hands,
is to seek you, to trace the distance
against ardor in the course of Autumn birch.
I gather the heavy scent, fondle it in cotton
above the changing leaves,
above the urgent of voices,
above the highest
           inclination

                                        of clouded blue.
My footfall is infinite;
it moves to a cadence
not my own, awaiting
homecoming like a second skin,
          where one pauses on the
boundaries of an atlas in expectation of
breath to breath or perhaps a candle
in the wake of night to lead the way.

To find is to resolve, to gaze beyond
the carroty of cones that direct through
                                        intersections,
farther than the the dusts of Arizona,
             the streams
that emptied long after your exodus.
And I know if I unearth you, I open brilliance,
a man softened, aged gracefully through-
out the years, where my flesh becomes your
flesh as a garden is to soil.
                                         There I will inhale

once       only once, senses enduring the rush
that permeates within your beating chest.
I will linger for a moment, seconds before
I expire into the depths of your throat,
                                                lightly
smoothing the words you long to say.