Your skin isn't smooth

Your skin isn’t smooth. It’s white sky and peppered birds.
The trees in it hung with black gloves and red talismans,
Your carried luck, your sharper guide.

We are not lovers
But you have drawn on my face with your fingers these past mornings, so
I try to press yours with my darker autumn colours:

I am not your paperpaste wings, and you are not my sparrowhawk
(Although
seated next to me
you say (you look down) you might fly, and I,
all eyes and no breath
am also thinking you might)

We run the fields separately
And return to each other bashful:
Hoping it will be enough.

I wrote you a haiku:

I hold your wrists, locked,
Unlocked, us both ensnared
By their faultless red.

I won’t show you. We might be lovers, one day.
For now I will content myself
Plucking at the stars,
Putting them in your already-glowing hands.