Matins & Say tomorrow doesn’t come** | by Hayley Bowen

Matins
 
Before the first morning, 
before dawn had peeked in
 
through the uncurtained window,
before the throat-gravel of sleep

had been swallowed away,
before language was unstickied,

before words like, 
good morning. Or, I’ll make coffee, 

there was only him
saying I love you 

with the palms of his hands, 
whispering across the sheets,

only skin finding shoulders, 
hips, pulling.

The first words ever spoken were 
I miss you when we’re sleeping.

By the time eyes and voices
were as awake as bodies, he 

had taught the birds how to sing
in the morning, 

how to sing for
the blue cabinet of day as it opens

and how it stays that way: opening. 

Say tomorrow doesn’t come 
              after Ada Limón

When this ends as all things do, let this one thing remain. 
This here, this version of me and how I’m loving you—
you there on the couch with morning breath and yesterday’s shirt—
you loving me back in that wordless way of being next to me 
and knowing that it’s enough. 

So say tomorrow doesn’t come, say this is it, and by next daylight 
there will be no light at all except for the sun’s last crimson blink. 
And all the people will be standing there on the precipice of darkness, 
and I’ll be there too, searching the fathomless sea of goodbyes 
for your face. 

The geese will go first, following unreturnable exhale of ocean 
retreating for good. Then it will be the flowers leaving trails of seeds
behind. Then peaches shedding their skin and sloughing off all their fruit, 
pits rushing to catch up to everything else that has gone—
all the beer and the pillows and the moss and the paint and the love. 

Finally, we will be the last to say goodbye
and there will be no more poetry to tell you how it feels
like this, right here, on this couch not so much together as adjacent, 
how this is all too raw to touch. So I hope you take this with you now, 
this pit, and swallow it.