Your Face

I see your face
as if it were behind my eyes
projected upon everything.

For instance,
on the sky, a stage,
behind the drifting clouds
a curtain,
your eyes appear exotically
blinking through cloud lids.

Clouds,
being what they are,
have elsewhere to go,
and so I see the rest of you
flashing me
from time to time.

I don’t see them as things,
bunnies or gray lambs,
but as veils for what they hide,
far more beguiling,
strip tease, not nudity.

But sometimes
I need more of you;
that is not satisfying or enough
I wait for clouds to go
so I can see you whole again.

I feel them as images
as much as see them:
qualities, essences,
your pith and marrow,
nursing my spirit
at your breast.

If, like the unicorn,
I should miss the ark
and you should board alone
consider it a spell
cast upon my destiny
by a wiser breeder.

The clouds are time and distance
a long, long time of me
a far, far distance to you.

With certainty there is no choice.
With choice there is no certainty,
only how to wait, not whether.
I may be the worst of waiters,
but I love well.
I am worth waiting for.
Are you?

There will be a time to say
whether we are due or not.
That time is not this time.