FREE VERSE Poem: We’ve met before, by Louise des Places

We’ve met before,
when the sea was still young,
and we were salt dissolving into it,
dissolving into each other,
learning the delicate, hesitant
art of vanishing.

And again, as birds,
fragile, trembling,
realizing, too late, that sometimes
the difference between flying and falling
is only the sound of the wind in our ears.
That the rush in our chests
might feel like a high,
but Icarus, too, was laughing
before he hit the ground.

We’ve met as you and I,
in some other lifetimes,
where I watched you stake your lovers,
bodies layered like stones upon stones,
as to raise the height of some anonymous,
unreachable mountains,
that no one will ever climb, but you.
Returning with the devotion of a pilgrim,
who believes ruins might reveal a path.
And I forgave.

We shared some lives
washing fruits, folding shirts,
losing coins in the gaps of the sofas,
making vows, breaking them,
tending to each other’s dying parents;
while the fire of our ordinary gestures
burned louder than the passion of others.

We were never strangers
and yet, sometimes,
I looked for someone’s else arms
to feel like a kind of death postponed.

We are planets that have been colliding
for thousands of years.
Surfaces cracked, continents broken,
oceans evaporated into dust.
Meeting time and time again in the dark,
while we mistake the tremor of an impact
for the tenderness of a touch.
Every orbit a repetition of fate,
our gravity pulling us to endings
we mistake for beginnings.