Missing the Sun

(July 2021. I wrote this for Alison before she flew out to join me in the bus for our 5 week adventure around the Northwest. We hadn’t seen each other in 6 months while I’d been out west building the bus and she’d been in school. I showed her this poem on our 2 and a half year anniversary by the Columbia in Oregon. I thought we had a great trip together. In retrospect, I had already lost her.)

I still feel you, inside
The memory of warmth, the pull
Of your gravity no matter how far I fly.
I remember with what love
You let me leave you,
For my own good slingshotting me away
From our closest approach, flinging me
Out at the speed of love spiraling in—
I know how much you love me
By how little you want to own me,
Or fuse me, or use me, or burn me alive.
This way, the dance can go on,
And I, but a comet,
Could bear life with the water I carry to you.
Long have I flown; much have I seen;
Much more am I.
But it is getting colder.
The other stars have gotten no larger—
They do not compensate for the missing
Heat of my distant sun,
Which, though appearing smaller,
Is still much much brighter than the rest.
And I know, in truth,
That I have never for a second left your orbit,
No matter how different the world looks,
No matter how much cooler it feels.
My way is of rays from a center;
And the center has always been outside myself.
I am my own center, of course, and you yours.
But what moves me is the center outside myself,
The space I long to fill,
The yellow gravity I yearn towards,
The love pulling me
To push myself home.