and the host seats me so close to you
that your clean scent of shampoo and soap
persists long after our friendly hug hello
and I think about you in the shower
and then me in the shower with you
and then I make myself stop thinking
all together because you are ordering
eggs and pancakes and I must read
the menu and order something
without you noticing where I had drifted -
your soft back pressed against cool white tile
with warm water dripping from your
fingertips and hair and me just barely
pressed into your body but for two inches
and my hands intertwining with yours
and knowing that all this water,
bonded hydrogen and oxygen,
covering our skin remits the same matter
and energy of suns and comets and quasars
and maybe it has interacted before
because it feels like it has interacted with us
before and the fortune teller thinks so too
your shower is teeming
with lightning and thunder
because of our electricity,
this tremendous conductivity
melting carbon and despair
when our fingers interlace under
rivers of stars bringing their rays
of knowing for us to feel in our marrow,
connecting currents and souls,
and we send this back toward the darkness
shifting atoms of collective consciousness
through love and this how it feels
to see someone as never before,
to however briefly recognize infinity
in your fingertips, in your thoughts,
in your impulses and in your abiding desires,
and I want to ask you about your hopes
and what was missed along the way
and about soft, secret curvatures in your heart
and how you find truth despite this world
and this is what it is like to see you
as you have never been seen
and as I have never seen you -
and I am looking at you
when server asks for my order
and I ask for another moment to think
Elizabeth S. Gunn (www.elizabethsgunn.com) serves as the Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Business at Nevada State University. She writes poetry and fiction in Henderson, Nevada, where she lives with her wife and their three rescue pups in the endless Mojave Desert.