Song of the crickets

I ask you to describe the scene. You respond with a moonlit sea of crickets. A trail ahead of us converging into a single point beyond the trees.

You have your headlamp with you but decide the darkness is where we belong. You’re happy here as I am following the fading sun.

There are no questions for once. They come up only after I become a stranger upon leaving you. I step back into the subway station, accidently going

uptown even though I live in Brooklyn. Every passing face is a cloud, a fading pointillism of yesterday, the city colored by your skin and glasses

I’ve forgotten to bring. It’s annoying and beautiful all at once. The pigeons in their purple suits. The solemnity of concrete. How quickly touch fades.

I greet my usual sadnesses and the longings that remain forever a part of me with a sigh when I arrive home, feeling a little more

restless in the shadows but comfortable too, somehow, wondering how it is possible for anyone to see what’s inside me and still want to walk with it, to want it whole, to hold it

and think of waves in the forest, a moonlit sea of crickets, a trail ahead of us converging into a single point beyond the trees.

You have your headlamp with you but the darkness is where we belong. You’re happy here as I am tracing the fading light back

into the corners of language, toward shapes of heart and tongue my mouth has yet to learn: Spanish. Ukrainian. Spirit. Something about the necessity of suffering, the footholds of joy

that, when climbed, lead us elsewhere, somewhere where what is demanded of us is more than what we can know alone. Between us is where I will meet you

with a rucksack full of maps and petals, guitar strings, the very soil of my being out of which strife, song, and flowers grow.