memorization

Can I trace my fingers softly over your features?
Timidly breech my curiosity with my hand,
and carefully run a finger along the bridge of your nose to the tip,
and count the number of fingerprints it takes to reach
the peaks of your cheekbones and cascades back down again,
and may I memorize the shape of your lips?
Can you hold still long enough to let me feel the creases in upon your eyelids?
Do you notice how such peculiar colors float around behind them?
As if someone dropped paint within us as children and left our minds to swirl images with it;
do yours create landscapes of faraway places like mine do?
Do they form old memories like faded photographs?
Do they create new worlds and birth a scenery in vivid detail?
With intrepid fingers and with intent, can I draw the line of your jaw,
and escape down the steep waves and hollow caverns of your neck
until the horizon of your shoulders becomes set
with the last colors of the sun and incandescent stars float around us?

Can I keep searching your eyes? Peering in, trying to learn the art that is you?
I need to memorize you, so I know that you were real, when you, too, poof out of existence.