New poem: North & South (Unrelated to George Eliot)

North & South

We are North and South, respectively.

You are stoic, rocky terrain.

All corners and edges, the buttoned collar

pinned below your adam’s apple, your throat’s summit.

I am soft clay fields, yielding and sinking.

The kind of humidity that unties itself,

a wet you’re not quite sure you’re feeling, near-steam.

You are resilient pine and I am sloping dogwood.

I am the choking heat and brutal burning sun.

You are brittle biting cold and white paper blank sky.

But we can reach stretched fingertips-to-toes

and I will pass you a bit of me.

Will you exchange with me?

Lend me your shorebirds, dutiful aviators

guided by sun-compass as it sets over us.

I will save the dots of my lower-case i’s

and send them to you scattered across a blackboard sky.

Though the distance stretches between us,

I am wrapped in you as a cold breeze

drops evening temperatures. Your composure

once bouldered, is collapsed sand beneath me.

Our differences are perforated,

and we traverse when we fold in half.