We've been home from our honeymoon for nearly a month. All the bags are unpacked and we've settled into a rhythm of going to work, coming home, making dinner, tending to the garden, daydreaming. I used to write more about my trips, more detailed accounts perhaps, but with this trip I never expected to provide any kind of retelling of our road trip around the perimeter of Iceland. It feels a bit too holy to reduce to an itinerary. But as is my habit, I did let little poems and snippets burrow into my skin.
He is a watcher out of windows,
a soul adding wonder to rocks and trees and earth
He is a wanderer of the purest sort,
walking without the burden of calculated exertion
but carrying only the questions of who walked here first, whether it might rain
We're very different people. He taps my forehead sometimes and makes a typewriter noise, his signal that he can see my brain racing, calculating, adjusting, weighing any number of combinations of cause and effect. He adds friction to that momentum in the best possible way, turns a spiral into an arrow, sometimes a pillow.
All my life I've written poems and missives in my head. Sometimes they're not even sentences, just snips of language that describe a moment. The description has always been important to me, as if a moment isn't quite real, quite concrete, unless I can put words to it. Words unpack me better than pictures or gestures or actions. And I think that's why I've found writing in the context of marriage so reorienting. He makes my heart see pictures that I will never be able to describe and I find myself replacing poems with images in response. Not camera images, not snapshots of his head tilting out of the rain of a waterfall, not the way his eyes squint when he makes me laugh, but images of what love and care and hope feel like.
He was seated at our window this morning as I worked from home. They're taking down an enormous tree across the street and he described what they were doing, the ropes among the branches, the fall of larger limbs. It had no comparison to Iceland, but it reminded me of our standing on a boat in some Northern fjord, poised and hopeful as we waited to spot the splash of a humpback whale. He was behind me then, his hand occasionally on my shoulder. But the same picture came to me, my hands reaching into his chest and holding his heart, gently, like I was holding a kitten, a precious stone, a bomb.
I'll hold your heart forever, whatever the world around you provides, and whatever shape your heart takes. And I'll leave the descriptions to the rest of our lives, and trust that holding your heart can be its own kind of poem, written in heartbeats.
