Member-only story
My Topography
A poem on long love
It’s a pity we never wanted to try again at the same time,
she said.
I’ve never not wanted to try again, I confessed.
Twenty years is a long time to love someone.
This is not a neural network,
built when new synapses form
from long practices of habit,
though love’s a kind of habit, too.
This formation is not neural.
That’s too biological, molecular.
No, your love has been tectonic,
shifting my continents and core
with slow metamorphic force, unseen but felt.
Love sculpted hills of swelling familiarity
and carved canyons of longing;
love flowed in channels so deep
that they will never run dry again,
and they’re still subject to flood,
and I, subject to becoming floodplain
when I look at you, aware that there’s
no protected height I could scale
to rise dryly into the atmosphere.
