For Marc
When I get on the plane, alone again
after being pressed and pulled, and lean my head
against the window until someone bangs
a briefcase into the next seat, your hands
sometimes come to rest on my cheek and head,
turning my real face toward invisible you
waiting in New York, hands flatly tender
as the wing-tips of an angel’s hands—you
are an angel momentarily, treating
my wound of love. Then I feel to a depth rendered
painful in my exhaustion a retreating
into a love of your love that moves me
as the plane gathers itself,
but the bulk
of someone next to me removes your hands
for I am required to shift. As, invisibly,
they disappear, I am left with the fully adult
knowledge of my vacant self in your absence
and sit alert, but overpowered by the span
of distance between us, and by all spans:
that of your hands and that of our lives.
When I love you with a feeling of breaking
apart as the plane breaks from earth,
all is in fragments: the wing span
of the plane bursts the angel’s wing span
which regathers as the span of love’s aching
across the world’s girth.
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