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I Am Santo

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In Her Orbit

The scars on the windowsills, don’t they hint at love?

The care of the tape being applied each season the trees sprout their new life and the air warms as if bathed in the sun’s breath, she blockades her home as would a frontiersman his clan. It’s a gesture expected, perhaps common were it not for a history that disobeyed such sense.

This is how she cares: through action, through protection of the people held in time to the rhythm of her pulse, a steady beat that uncomplicates the complex and strips the puzzle of its loose architecture. For she is straightforward and direct, an inflexible line where mountains demand gentle routes of a circuitous character, and she doesn’t notice or care for their desires because this is simply who she is; a rock on the path that forges on as if a glacier, unyielding to any obstruction, indifferent to any circumstance. And yet this isn’t a fire burning through days of challenge that line up as tinder hurdles on an endless track, nor is it a simple test of temerity, for the cool in the air is pleasant and soothing and the sky remains unchoked with the charred smog of common adversity.

Incendiary practice dodged, she controls the course with calm and the compliant fall in line as they should, not pushed or convinced so much as swayed as if a tide under lunar pull. And he slides into her undertow as well, despite fighting for a beach that would surely rob him of life, for he is impulse and daring, a flash of rabid charisma that knows no better of this world than the next wave ridden; the next bite at release.

Yet she holds him in orbit, her gravity maintaining for him a steady path despite his hunger to spin out into the black in search of stars swaddled in nuclear passion, the pull of the unknown thrill crossing impossible distance and beckoning him with the possibility of more. But he smiles back at her, graciously thankful for her hand and breast upon which she’s shed countless pains as saltwater spill, and she’s spoken to him in quiet tones to quell his raging heart. For she is love in action, the balance of accommodation and respect, guiding hands leading to a darkened room where expectations are sated with tenderness, and care is deftly administered in precise measure – not without smiles and sweat, but at the expense of hours seeking less ardent affection: a hand held, a task completed, a kiss shared but not pursuing breathless resolution.

His love is fire and bluster, the grand gesture played before an audience of fools, the scent of rose and iron cast into the air where others stir, striving for attention yet turned to ash in his searing artifice. And she turns, an act of simple care committed, a window sealed to stop threats to that which she holds most dear, a sonnet sung flawlessly without the dissonance of infatuation.

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