conspire

what I mean when I say

I want to share air with you

is not the poetry of it.

you on your end of the couch,

me on mine, the dog between us

like a comma, and the whole time

something passing back and forth

without meaning to.

I take in what the maple gave up.

you take in what I couldn’t hold —

my exhale, the spent part,

the carbon of the day,

the meeting that ran long,

the thing I said wrong.

it crosses the cushions

and you breathe it anyway.

somewhere in Toledo a woman

is doing this with someone else —

her own couch, her own dog

curled in the space between them,

a casserole cooling on her stove,

thirty years of air

I will never breathe.

somewhere a poet on the far side

of the world is hunting for

the same word I’m hunting now,

and missing it, just like me.

I used to think love was the oxygen —

the bright molecule.

but it’s the whole exchange.

what I want to share with you

is not just the breathable world

but the waste of it,

the meaningless Tuesdays,

the exhaust of a life still running.

con and spirare —

to breathe together.

which is all conspiracy ever was:

two people in a room

trading the same air

until it’s hard to say

whose plan this is anymore.

and that’s all we’ve been plotting,

all these years —

tonight the furnace hums,

the dog dreams her big dreams,

and I lean close enough

to take what you’re letting go.