Love Poem: DECEMBER I & II, by Natalie Hanagan

I

Every year I spend December
in your bedroom,
where we lie in gentle lights
and watch the snow
and shrieking city sirens.
We touch and we listen,
see meaning in each flurried
piece, quiet flakes of creation
soft and unsullied.
How still the world can be,
you tell me in wordless
whispers, shadows on your skin
and sweat on your lip. You hold me
in rag shacks of sheets while I try
to fight off sleep. Fluttering
around us, the snow glows
and gathers and thinks,
heaps itself in another,
folded into one
and nothing at once.

II

Many things I struggle to string together
into a lace of words that will please you.
Watching you, I am pulled and peeled,
shorn in two and tugged apart by
forces far beyond my furthest fences,
things I do not understand
but must explain to you.

To touch you is to be a piece of you,
coherently mirrored,
creatures of a species.
Your presence unfolds me,
fingers like fate and hands
that hold me,
rock me into a world
that feels real.