Where Do You and I Begin?

Where do you and I begin?
Whose thoughts and feelings are these?
Has my pre-dawn smile
rippled in light of yours
countries away?
Is my smile
the fruit of your dreaming play?
Has a twofold smile
just teased out the sun
and honeyed the brightness,
the smile of that one?
Beloved, are these sensations
that curl about my garden’s clovers,
tracing the garden’s blooming kite,
that dapple the weeping willow
with delight –
do they suffuse a stream
that now inhabits or courses through
your nightly dream?

Where do you and I begin?
Are sadness and anxiety
sometimes assuming your image, your form,
merely mine? Or are they yours?
Do I experience your imagined future?
Your uncertainty in the face of multiple doors?
Is the poem now unfurling on this page
a feature of your freshness, that youth of yours?
Do my dreams of being bewildered, back
in university color and mold
your seeings, your surprise?
Am I in fact you walking on campus?
Am I looking through your eyes?

Your culture, your parents could not
have approved of us, permitted us…
Yet this love that weaves our dreams together,
it burns but the brighter – as us.

Share: