everyone who might wander into its radiance

The palm trees speckled the night horizon as we walked down the OB pier. I held your hand and the smell of salt lay heavy in the air. Families fished on either side of us, casting lines over our heads and then back into the ocean, the waves bringing in more blackness dripping from the stars down the inky sky, drenching the water. You commented on how fishing was a family affair. Whichever parent wasn’t fishing sat on the dock with little kids sleeping on his or her lap. Spanish music floated on the too warm fall air.

We decided to leave the sepia-lighted pier full of people who themselves were growing sepia in the drooping glow. We did not want to be hazy like the rest of them. We wanted to be, and we were, luminous. The moon tried to light a path for us as we climbed the cliffs and stepped over water pooled in cold cracks. Finally we found a desirable spot—jutting out from the cliffs was a rock platform ideal for watching waves. We climbed up and opened a bottle of apple cider. I laid my head on your shoulder.

“I’ve decided that you’re one of the best things to happen to me in a long time,” you said. My mind went back to the night we stayed up talking until the sun edged the night away with a creeping, glowing pinkness.

We talked for a long time. The waves grew bolder and taller, rocketing up the cliff’s barrier. Eavesdropping on our conversation. We talked about snippets in time that stitched our relationship together thus far.

We talked about sitting in your house, a fully alive breeze danced and spun through the windows held open by books of poems, windows which refused to stay open on their own accord. We summoned Gallway Kinnell, e. e. cummings, and Billy Collins as a force against the gusts. I remember sitting there, hearing the poetry from your mouth leaving slowly then snapping in the breeze like a banner.

With tape you hung two poems above your bed. You transferred them to my room where they doubled as dream catchers and were the last thing my eyes saw before closing in sleep. Since that lyrical summer, I no longer sleep under those poems, but the images remain taped to the rafters of my brain.

One of the things we first found we had in common was our shared love of poetry; it’s really no wonder then that the two of us together are like a poem with each hour becoming a new verse and every day another stanza. We found an excerpt from an introduction by e. e. cummings and clung to it:

“The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are humanbeings; mostpeople are snobs. you and i are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. you and i wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything”