It Could be Otherwise

It is this.

This waking in the warmth of us,

his brown shoulder ever

my western mountain

inching slowly, as mountains do

toward me. I am no valley.

The long cloud of my arm

drapes along his gentle slope

a promise of weather.

The silence holds us

as it holds everything,

preferring not one thing

over another.

with a grateful nod to Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise”