When you look at me like that

A love poem for the days you believe in it

Anthropology
for Vika

I study every ruin of you and revelation—
your lips my fossils,
your laughter a songbook of gods whose notes I tape together at night in my journal.

You are the field site I keep returning to:
your breath charted in odes,
your moans the first language.

I love to live in your borrowed light—
how your tongue finds my pulse, my myths, my marrow,
how you name every soft animal in my body
and then set it free.

I am struck dumb—each day—by happiness

so I become an anthropologist of your desire,
wrap my mouth around its artifacts,
gather them like clay shards and dig and dig and dig

I find prayer in the slope of your shoulder

hope in the rise of your ribs, the flush and catch of you that runs down my chin

I wear your pleasure like a collar.

Your hips are a hypothesis I test each morning.
Your thighs—proof.

I bathe in you, am baptized in your beginnings—

No good story ends where it started,
and so it is with you—
each joy another excavation,
another reckoning unearthed.

Your body is the answer to every question worth asking:
Who built this house of longing?
Where do the wild things go when they are loved?

There are too many yeses.
I can’t possibly classify them all.
They drop from my mouth—ripe, rife, bursting—
and gather at your feet like fruit.