Work Text:
His dreams are as grand as
the domes of palaces that scrape the sky.
He talks in hyperbole,
proposes what-ifs and laments the if-onlys
that men like us have not the capacity to realize.
He should know better, I tell him all the time.
He should know better than to build dreams made of glass,
and leave me to pick up the pieces when they shatter.
I should know better, he tells me all the time,
than to embrace only what is rational.
There is a universe of poetry, of art,
of joie de vivre, as they say in Fontaine—
if only I’d open my sorry eyes to it.
What I don’t tell him is this:
I need not look anywhere else but in front of me.
He is poetry in the way he walks,
in the way the world softens around him.
He is art in his charcoal-stained knuckles,
in the colour that blooms on the apples of his cheeks
when I kiss the nape of his neck.
If I know anything of joie de vivre, I learned it
not from the kind of scripture or literary masterpiece
that other scholars dedicate their lives to poring over,
but from walking together with him—
my footsteps falling into rhythm with his,
standing in the shade of his smile,
a burst of sun on an overcast day.