Fall April Climbing

In my waking I measured the colors of mornings. The whiskey-netted greens. The just-breathing blues. The color, too, of you. At dawn I warmed my toes and boiled water for tea. I waited for you to catch the trout, did yoga on the cold wet grass. I watched the quiet simmer slow and looked through pages for new dreams and old ascents.

We waddled. I caught the sun. Under the blankets, in the van, I counted the cans on the fence and the sheep raced off. I kept your days outnumbered and kissed you before it wasn’t too cold or too late outside the blankets outside the van door. Your touch was in my skin. I paused the moment of holding our comings and goings and goodbyes. Our driftings. The way we used these cliffs as ways to lay face to face and realign old loves with new.

Then day broke bold. We found our way to roofs. You unrolled desert dirt on a pacific island and felt insecure exposed. For each there was a crack, an edge, a fine fresh dust to rekindle the memory of reworking, to risk caressing comfort. In tremblings and warmth, I closed my mind and looked on with nothing but this movement, with touch in my breath. I held the uncertainty at the sleeves. Wiped dirt off my soles, clipped chains, breathed the view, and before another, lowered back to you, by you. Always back to you.

The rock is shist, randomly chaucey, mostly overhanging but crimpey. At dusk the faces we see shin blue and silver and reawaken stillness. Here, these nexts and lasts consume the textures of ascents, the way we change our ups and downs to side by sides, the way we change morning to warmth and winter to this fall. In this churning, this dangling between love and time, between you and rock, I’m in the process of untangling my body from ropes and fear.