scarcely there

you are scarcely there –
solid only on those spare
nights when you sleep beside me

by day you fall apart –
like bread in water or
the clods of dry earth
I strike from the roots of weeds

I have come to tell you
there are no new prayers,
that what it is that leaves
us at dawn, leaves us

to tell you that some subtle thing
in our spines has shifted,
and I am unwilling now to
peel myself away from loneliness

neither of us, I think,
is meant to be one-nested,
though were we to be
taken from ourselves,

we would carry still a memory –
homage to our quiet beginnings,
a wind that tugs at the milkweed seeds

© Sarah Whiteley