gravitant

I don’t remember
the exact moment
it became hard to breathe around you —
not the bad kind of hard,
the kind where the air
has simply grown too thick
with everything I mean
and can’t say right,
the way a storm front
holds its breath
before it releases its wrath.
I carry you the way the earth
carries its own weight —
not noticing, mostly,
until something reminds me
what enormous thing
I’m holding.
You fit inside a sentence
like you always belonged there.
You fit inside this metaphor.
You fit inside a Friday afternoon,
And yet
the weight of you
bends the day.
Not a burden —
not the kind of heavy
you’d set down.
More the way
a bell is heavy
and still we ring it.
More the way
Sunlight is heavy
at the end of a long afternoon
when it comes through sideways
and turns everything gold
and terrible and ours.
I have run out of words
to approximate precisely
what I feel.
I keep trying new ones —
enormous, oceanic, marrow-deep —
and they come back to me
slightly embarrassed,
having missed the mark.
So I just stand in it.
The way you stand in a cathedral
Breathless, and silent
because the ceiling
already said everything there is to say.