For You

Jojo,

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Two Novembers ago, among paintings, I walked in looking for art and found you instead.

          Your request not to stare
          is like telling the tide not to follow the moon.
          How does a man look away from such a view,
          from the tender paradox of you,
          cute and sexy, somehow,
          in the kind of smile I would lose myself into?
        

          You taught me love like a language
          I had seen all my life
          and never understood,
          and every day I learn another word of you,
          another syllable, another secret shore,
          another shade of cute and sexy
          I had not seen before.
        

          I love your eyes, and the eyebrow that refuses to rise.
          I love the way you curl into me and go quiet,
          as if the day had finally let you go.
          I adore the small shifts and signals of your body and soul,
          the language beneath the language,
          the sound I love most of all, your laugh,
          the one I would choose, if I could only
          keep one sound from this life.
        

You listen the way the night listens to rain, and under that attention, even my ramblings find their way.

          Your love for the moon has always intrigued me.
          Now I wonder if mirrors show you what they see.
          It has spent every night studying you for its glow,
          and the nights it gets close enough, the whole world knows.
        

          So until Paris,
          and every other city we'll see
          from your private jet,
          I will keep learning love in your handwriting,
          slowly, reverently,
          the way one learns the lyrics
          of the only song one intends to sing
          for the rest of one's life.
        

Yours, and staring,

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