Like Your Mountains
Ingrid Weimer
last night we met
a ghost in a field, thank god
you waited to tell me it came
right for us ‘cause i was already tripping back
across the rocks and twigs in my
black laced heels, not meant
for running in the wild.
i traveled back to your car on a bed of sorry
and it was dark but still the clouds
held day’s white luminescence
along the indecipherable horizon you told me
i’ve never seen a shooting star.
look up! look
up! i saw two and wished
vaguely (for us).
i couldn’t see
your features in the dust dark
massachusetts of the field.
so i looked up or i closed my eyes to kiss
your lips i could only trust were there
ten inches, six inches, two away, zero.
you know the fact of you scares me:
my veins pulsed twice as fast
as they would’ve with the ghost. i made you feel,
finger to throat. the trees rustled
to our left and it was something i wanted
in a photograph, but in front of me
i still couldn’t see so i pulled
your powder cheeks towards me.
please let me see you.
wouldn’t it be nice to see
our shadows in charcoal
the blackness of the crops the white
of confused day clouds
and the fingernail moon hung
in the apparition’s night?
after running from the fear we drove
to the new familiar nowhere where
the windows were boarded up
and a bendy white plastic chair sat itself
on the red-brick ledge like someone’s stoop.
you parked so we sat in shadow,
pushed your seat almost to horizon.
i wanted to perch on the broken old
but couldn’t move ‘cause now your features,
and how your moth-wing face
won’t let my teeth hide.
my chest filled (it’s been doing that)
but in that way that way,
the how i can’t move, the sinking lifting
stomach, the bass vibrating in my body
like this -
your face your face, and as we kissed again,
the song that is fulton street under construction
the place that is gowanus when i knew it.
i wanted to say
new words