if you leave it alone

If I was the kind who was inclined to cry
I'd cry for the strings I cut loose
And I'd cry for the bridges I burned
Just to make myself a little room to move

I'm full up with lessons learned
And the days that I made just to throw them away
Now I'm closing all the curtains, I'm switching off the phone
Now I took down all your cameras, and I opened the fridge

And hung from the hinges with the
Eggs and garlic, the cheese and tomatoes, the milk and the beer
The strings and the bridges of a brand new year
The first tear was a note and a note made a song

And I hung the song from the hinges of the door
And I carried on just the same as before
And nothing got different, and nothing got changed
But a new tune gets sweeter and simpler with age

If you leave it alone
If you leave it alone
If you leave it alone

It gets sweeter and simpler and softer
and slower and younger the longer
you leave it alone

So I wrote you a note and, the note read
There's so much good silence in the emptiest heads
And her tipped my mouth towards pillowless beds
And poured out my brains and my guts into his

And for each dear black sentence a sheer lack of tears
No I don't want those words back I don't miss those years
But if I could hold your knees again, under my chin again
If I could kiss your nose us both brittle and thin again

Maybe then maybe then I could get light again
Maybe then maybe then I could get light again
If I could kiss your toes
Kiss your ribs, kiss your fingers

Well maybe then maybe then I could get light and then
I would be light, I would be light, I would be light, I would be light

Oh but, If you leave it alone
If you leave it alone
If you leave it alone

It gets sweeter and simpler and softer
And slower and younger the longer
You leave it alone

Leave it alone
Leave it alone
Leave it alone

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Ellen Bass