You Change All the Lead [Sadness of a friend]

Sadness of a friend, no isolation is so external.
To be so far, to share the same infinitive sky.
A life
of parentheses disengages,
leaving a single period on a white sheet.

This ink, this blood, these images
among concomitant friends and beautiful horizons,
echoes in my intellect, one body movement from a far lake or, less easily,
a flashlight against a daylit night sky.
These stars are different down here. Everything is different,
what this is, and what this is not.

A hug from the near-dead, a picture of the forgotten,
a richly colored sky on the day we are born.
A compliment from a stranger, a tree branch in reach,
so changes the sadness, so changes the friendship.

Untouched skin, unwatched planets, the core of Gaea's pubis
from which smooth and wondrous paths venture out
before calling back in the grammar of ancients.

My pulse fuels this constant fire, an approaching blaze.
My ink learns. My church burns.
Do you? Light as the biggest cloud, thick as a moan.
With an indication of all existence, you connect with me,
A single, perfect lily placed deep, deep, within my now perfect soul.