Trading Paper Hearts

 Wait for the lightning bolt,
they say.
You’ll know
when it’s right.

But how can she acknowledge a
capricious flash
when her eyes grow full on the
chameleon line
of one man’s mouth?

Whose laugh is like an
engine’s roar,
voice the slip of
graphite on white,
his quiet sighs
all she can hear.

He looks like
the kind of man who can
hold a whisper in his hand
for days.

And somehow she knows
the sun sleeps deep in his belly…
she moves closer unconsciously.

*

What do you do for a living?
(She recites the line from a script we all have tattooed on our wrists.)

I make clouds.
(A deviation. She smiles, accidentally, with no ulterior motives.)

How?
(She needs to know.)

I’ll show you.
(He shows her.)

*

His clouds are made of paper -
she must have known all along.

Sometimes he uses scissors, but
more often than not he
simply tears them along
fault
lines only he can see.

They can take a minute
or a week
to finish, but they are always
strange
and beautiful and
pure.

He can’t sell them.

Well,
he could,
but he won’t.

Instead, he abandons them in secret
places to be discovered by strangers,
delighted and confused by a stranger’s
gift.

You and your paper clouds, she tells him, I can’t take you anywhere.

Because her mother advised her
to love the man who loves her
more, and her grandmother taught her
never to burn bridges.

*

Stop being afraid, he tells her one day.

I’m not afraid of anything, she says back.
(Because she wasn’t, before him.)

You are. It’s why you won’t touch me. You’re afraid I’ll consume you.

Won’t you?

Until there’s nothing left.