When I come home and think of worlds,

it’s the currents and fragrances and music,

impermanence baked warm, ephemeral futures peeling

of the trembling atoms that punctuate and constitute this.

Leaves twinkling in the early air,

or their ghosts humming around the branches -

cherry in Brooklyn, oak in the Valley,

jacaranda and auspicious blooms in San Diego,

lavender in the scorched rows lining the fields,

where the air smells sweet.

I breathe it, and the softness of your eyes,

mooring earnest through your hands, and

that - the sky of pine and cypress and lemony wildflowers

and you, who steep the ambience in the curls of beauty -

bring me to the place before I was, or knew,

where green figs burst as alveolar buds, milky and fruiting

with saccharine fodder for progeny, and

along the black and gray stone beaches, a crisp Aegean

sparkling with πεταλούδες* and αχινούς,** clinging

to rocks or clutching pebbles to their bodies,

so sharp and soft,

a lesson in interdependence -

and again, a grounding to you,

all breeze and clarity and confusion,

I’ve never seen something prettier,

save maybe the sea, the fruits, and creatures

nourished and made cold by it.

The East River begins (if water can be said to have a home)

in a canal underlaying the Verrazzano Bridge —

the Narrows, a tidal strait magnetizing

the upper and lower New York Bays,

where I would often watch waves of oil and water

lapping the obscure stones, pink in their reflection of a

grapefruit sunset, sublime by way of particulate

matter and the finger of God,

hanging atop the city, my arms dangling

over a metallic railing, hydrogen bonds and the cohesion

of it all drawing the water out from my eyes and

back towards their home.

You were even there, the leaf suspended

by the slow tide, gull calling overhead.

In Meteora, a swallow so small

but exacting in its grace, chevron tail slight as a fish’s,

cutting an imprint of its silhouette in a sky

powdered by fog and monastic gravity.

I hold my hands to recall your touch,

travel back to one of my homes accessible only by

200 tons of steel and sky and currency, but also

through closing my eyes,

kissing this part of the world that created you.

*limpets

**sea urchins