We Left Everything Unsaid

I did an interpretive dance to explain why
I had to leave so suddenly and why
I was never coming back,
but you took my arms,
held away from my body
and making wide arcs above our heads,
as the sun and my lips,
pressed in a thin red line,
as the horizon
and my legs,
blue in their denim,
swaying back
and forth
as an enormous mythical shark,
old as time itself,
creator of earth, sky and sea,
swimming powerfully through
our lackluster plane of existence.

You built a shrine to that shark,
lit candles every day without fail,
bit everything that looked like a seal
with the ferocity of a streamlined oceanic predator.

No one could reach you by phone,
you wouldn't answer your door;
the only way to make you notice
anything was to bleed up to
a quarter of a mile away.

Once I saw you in a shopping mall
buying new shoes and moving slightly
to the drone of conversation. You looked
like millions of years of evolution had shaped you
for buying shoes; as if this was what I had
been getting at all along.

These new developments made me come back,
and stand at a comfortable distance
with my lips pursed as if I could kiss you
at any moment. I caressed your back the right way,
placed my lips on lower left of your exposed neck
and stayed there: away from your mouth,
away from your rows and rows of teeth.