Wormhole

Once the sky was still a blue membrane

that rippled over you, breathed

into you, when the forest was still

pine and clouds, so your hands

smelled of pine and clouds, trout scales

shining them for days.

Now the trees are shadows burned

into wind, as if frozen mid-implosion.

My hands won’t move

but my wrist vein wrinkles with a pulse

and I hear the blood

in the shadow I am in this forest:

all of us shadows in rows, growing like roots

down from the white lake of sky.

When my vision parts I see the other side:

seconds there like scales glittering

through a break in a river,

the forest there still growing arterial,

and I know the veins will meet

and merge, a transfusion of particles,

and there I will tear my body from its hold

and pull your body from the lake

and suck the blood from your lungs

and replace it with my breath

and clothe you in my skin,

which once was your shadow

cast across the path in the forest

we once walked together, two objects

impossibly colliding, a clot

in a rippling tunnel of wind.