a steady course

Only you would be here –
running toward, not from, the body’s bright-red flare.
It screams of some emergency.
Such white-light signals – the brain snaps, crackles,
hisses spit-fire lightning.
Everyone is afraid of the burn – but not you.
Hard we swim against the light.
You fight the ocean’s rough current
just to be by my side.
Such things you have seen, yet still –
unafraid of the blue-volt streaks that tear
jagged ribbons that rip the green of my iris.
Of all I thought would be
it was always some other, never you.
A would-be-he – my casual savior who appeared to me in dreams
as I slept thickly through the night’s dark blue.
I bought it all: gift-wrapped, ribbon-tied –
    so deceptively pretty.
Yet when I awoke it was you –
my blue-eyed steady calm,
steady at the helm of our love
following a course dictated by the silvered Northern skies.
Last night I dreamt a mackeral sky,
thickly-mauve and silvered like the scales of a fish.
Friend, lover you had me laughing
as we walked hands double-clasped
straight into the eye of the storm.