winter bones and other love letters

you write to me in orange but i don't get it in time, so i show up
to the wrong hill on fire, the wrong december, overlooking
those thirteen crosses. you once said they were nearing the top,
and i decided not to mention the dreams of us in body bags,
one foot closer to my door every night. i'd rather not be a prophet.
i spend enough time standing over smokejumper graves
and saying we can run away, we can run whenever we want,
i know grass that burns better, and my words will echo
because i am not the first fool to say them on this ridge.
a fire on the horizon means it's not too late, a fire on the stove
means you're coming home again, the fire in your lungs
is still learning of new ways to die with no last words.

i must have whispered too many questions
into your ribs— where there was once silence,
the living holding their breath and voice,
what's left of you is at last offering its answers
when you should be more worried about dissolving
into the next breeze or crumbling into the sand.

you see, i no longer care how your heart shudders
(i don't want to know what it's doing instead now)
or how air currents rub at your lungs (now that
you're windswept). this was only useful information
when you knew how those felt. here's how it works:
i ask my questions about life to the living only
and i lay the ones about death out on the shore.
i'd rather you answer only the latter, but when
i go down to the lake you speak only in snaps
of brittle bone. i suppose even ghosts must have
subjects that they wish could be finally laid to rest.

i think the world did end, not so long ago,
and we celebrated. we danced to the lightning
that snaked over the sky through your window,
every burst of vicious white the only light
in the ballroom of a kitchen that was too narrow
to spin you in, just long enough to waltz
back and forth a few steps. but we didn't complain
because as we knew, the planet wasn't spinning anymore.
any rotation of ours would've been a pale imitation
of its dance, and we were never set on living up
to the performance it set. now, i can safely say
there is little to look forward to once we screech
to a halt. skeletons don't stay standing, hearts
don't stay warm, and winter is happy to close
you eyes as you drown under unforecasted snow.

i know how it goes, darling. you pull your stars
from the sky and i stitch them together into
your favorite things: the shape your fingers take
when holding your coffee, a twist of hair from
the wind braiding it for you, the first flake of snow
to grace your eyelashes. see, these are also
my favorite things, and i would tell you as such
if the skies i use to navigate my way to you
weren't always changing into new forms.
fickle things, these constellations. abstraction
must be my love language— i can speak to you only
in nebulous metaphors, and you do not understand
these signals of light that are lost in translation,
flickering out somewhere six feet above hoarded stars.