Love Song for Sadness

O Sadness,
i want to fall in love with you.
i want to know the way your skin smells,
the way your looks across the room
taste.
i want to run down the street to give you flowers
in a rainstorm.
i want your hand against mine
to anchor me.

Sadness,
i want to marry you
in a field of purple flowers taller than we are.
i want to sing my vows to you
like opera,
and make love to you
just after the song is over,
the flowers looking down on us
like angels or apparitions
wearing purple ball gowns
that bow in the sunlight,
our bodies bowed together.

Sadness,
i want to write you love letters
that glide across oceans
as if they have wings,
and i want you to be the wings that carry them.

i want to plant a garden for you.
i want to watch the flowers open for you,
the buds breaking the earth,
like breath in cold air--
a sudden completeness.
i want you to be my hands in the earth and sun,
the cloth of sky,
the strings of silence,
plucked and still sounding.
i want you to be the silent music
my feet move to,
when i walk across the room to you,
the tip-tap rhythms my eyes blink to,
out-of-sync to anything but us
a morse code to count the emptiness and silences and desperations.

Sadness, i want to find you under my fingernails and be grateful,
the way i am grateful
for the miracles
of stars,
lizards scattering on the sidewalk before me,
conversations.

i want to wear your glances like jewelry,
draped around me.
i want your body against me to be reason enough to exist,
to leave me emptied of wishes for anything but
this moment, this ache,
this breath in the night.