to an ex-lover

you tried to escape the gravity of my body
and this was not hard to do.
a week of heart ache, two weeks of chills,
shaking in the darkness of solitude,
running your eyes blind with tears
until you were free of my orbit, you thought.
free to collide with and orbit other bodies
free to expand your galaxy and blow it up.

free until now---a quake of your mind
brings it all back, and this you cannot control.
the subject of days is your torture in nights.
a sound you hear playing with another body,
you twist in fear that i have come home.
laughter in a coffeshop and you drop the book
to peer round the bend, but i am not there.
you dress sometimes thinking its our cocktail hour.

and then one day you call me and ask where i am,
and where i am going and what i've been up to.
you compare the charts of our star maps,
search for greater meaning and twinkle for details.
now the child of you has landed again on my moon.
you sketch a corona around my earth rise
and say this is as close to paradise as you may come,
a twisted catholic notion you have no business believing in.

the gates of my mind have never closed before you
and they never will. you may visit as often as you wish.
the body i am is everywhere you go, my mind everything you know.
you are the comet, but i in your mind am the universe.
try to escape and you will return to me in reverse,
your turning back, only thoughts now, like your first leaving was.
a body here and there separated only by different names,
while the comfort and truth of my mind surrounds you always.

Originally published on AIDYs Poetry Blog