Still Any Sky

Ask me what holds beauty infallibly, and I’d describe them:

Night drives from Pennsylvania to Florida,

hurling down everlong tired interstates,

the pale blue-green switchbacks of horizon and neon exit signs

reflecting off each other like young brothers playing tag,

or sunrises suspended thirty five thousand feet in the air,

first a honeyed thing then cracked wide open and sizzling

from where I sit in the emergency exit row, on fire with love.

Even the silver swirling storm that caught me mid-walk on the coast,

gray waves crashing back, lost like a prayer for the drowned, still living,

like every merlot moment, hours poured on a stranger’s rooftop in Spain,

and what clouds could smother me more than those

apricot swirls of grief in the mornings alone, the color of quiet

to fading still pink as the tongue in the just-dead deer’s mouth

off a road in the town I grew up in and took you home to,

memories purpling like wine drunk bruises I couldn’t show but name.

God, how the night hurts so pretty into dawn—

how I want so badly to keep it between my teeth

until I can taste fully what’s never been mine.