The space between us was not a breach
but an expansion: you the one who travelled
the circumference of the world and I,
the stiff leg of the compass pair, bracing
to support us both, fixed to our centre-point
bodily, my reaching heart split between
what I’d always known and desire as liquid
as the moon-pulled sea. We tried our best
to make our valediction, as Donne suggested,
forbidding mourning, ‘careless’, but it was not
in our leaving but our re-uniting that we
became airy as beaten gold, our skin raw
to the unfamiliar touch, leaf-thin, gilded.

When we embraced, I wrapped you
into me – your shape a mirror, a home,
our hips and breasts slotting into the valleys
of the other’s curves - not my twin but my
completion, the body that taught me to know
my own. My magnetic North, my lodestone,
I drew you close, clung to you like an opulent
embroidered coat a diva would clutch
at the neck as its folds swung around her:
tightly, while allowing elegance of movement,
the physical distance to breathe. My fingers
were white from the tension of holding you,
the desperate fear you’d once again leave.