"Wear your overcoat," you teased and so I did,
the salty one stitched with seabreeze and constellations

and an inner pocket for lip balm. Driving up I glimpsed you
dancing on the sand then clambering onto impossible crags

where it seemed the lighthouse beacon would never reach,
but it did and I smiled despite the clutching in my stomach.

I hadn't imagined it being awkward like a first date
where the cologne wafts past and the instant of kissability

falls into my lap where the napkin and tablecloth edge linger,
and yet here it was, the crossing of the Pacific and me, well both

of us shy as kittens and playfulness glinting in the corners of our
eyes. I hadn't imagined it being dangerous like the inevitability

of parting amicably or otherwise, and yet it was just that,
inevitable as the salt you had and would stitch into my overcoat,

the taste of your breathless kiss almost stinging as it sang deep
deep into my lungs, into my stomach with the knot clutching tighter.

It could have been your steady gaze or beckoning abandon that
did me in, but it was your sighs full of life and death, hunger and

disenchantment, elation and misery and us, yes us, that thrust me
into the sky for that fateful moment when the lesson of Icarus met

the stillness of gloaming and everything became possible again
and tragic only described a parched throat of longing. Afterward you

grinned a mirth from the city of my childhood, briefly silent and secretive,
the rush of wind and blood filling my ears like twilight in cahoots

with the jaded hopeless romantic, and I was lost with you
coaxed from warm cobblestones and skylines to this spinning passage

of fearless grace as the roar of Point Reyes receded from my eyes
and I climbed down from the deck. So I relived learning to julienne

with the afternoon flaking through lidded drapes onto uneasy scratches
of wooden cutlery, waving goodbye as I clasped you to my soul

in that awkward embarassment with which all learning and loving begins.