I COULD HAVE LOVED YOU

Painting by Peter Severin Koyer

I could have loved you

and stroke your hair back from

your sweaty forehead

with my mind:

it would be a dream within a dream,

a metaphor written on your distant skin.

I would study the rhythm of your walk

as you realized how small my body was

to hold my outsized soul.

Your thoughts would curl

under my skirt and love would kneel

in front of you and gently kiss your legs.

I could have loved you 

as the moon sews the satin stars.

We would open ourselves

and our latitudes would be the same

when I whispered your name in my moments

of oblivion, in my pleasure and pain.

I imagine you writing me poems,

undressing the night,

teaching me a language I will never speak.

I imagine you awakening things in me:

things forgotten,

things unsaid,

things unheard.

I could have loved you

but you never looked up

enough to see me.

You disconnected the machines,

slowing my heartbeat.

Couldn't tell you to stop;

 my throat was too tight to speak.

 (But you wouldn't listen to me anyway)

The lines on the monitor went flat.

You killed me.
Why am I still breathing?

Karla Bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2011