I Cannot Profess to Know You by Olivia Lee

I cannot profess to know you

I only watch from afar as before your eyes, sunlight unfurls itself

How, kite-like, you draw sight to the bright, sprawling sky

Oh, time, does she steer me towards you,

Gliding her fingers across her loom

To trace our lives, woven together over the gulf

Or are we two birds that wing and dive in different currents,

Plunging, missing, and then I will never dock in your harbor

And you won’t pine for my careening orbit when I am gone

I can only hope you might choose to shatter my lacquer visage,

Willingly topple forward into the deafening darkness

Find me, a wandering beast blindly roving

For a spider web silk thread of tenderness

To tether me against the ache of the abyss

To be an anchor that hooks into my bruised flesh and carries me up

Breathes kaleidoscope vision and buoyant ambition into me

I know you cannot save me from this plunge, both flight and fall, through space,

But I yearn so we might, like a whipping bolas,

Feel the counterbalance of someone on the other end,

As we surge and crash with the tsunami, as we swing forward

When thoughts scatter and smash, when I scrabble against the walls

I still reach to grasp the flitting butterfly

The hope that if I never find purchase,

I will at least know my plummet has purpose

For if you can make this ephemeral life worth it,

Then I can profess to know you