For Tara
Before you,
and before this,
I was a wool sock
full of lead bricks
in a clenched fist
I was
stone.
My favorite books;
those love stories whose quotes
I had once etched into my
eyelids
had moved
to the bottom of the stack
had
slipped under the carpet
my eyelids
were erased
and replacing these quotes
were notes to myself
saying
Keep these lids closed.
You can’t miss what you pretend
you’ve never seen.
So I spent one month
this past summer
sleeping on the floor
And I always locked the door
and I never bought a bed
Instead
I focused on
turning myself in to bread
With the hope
that enough people could
pull pieces from me
as to make me feel needed
I needed that.
Meanwhile
I laughed
as I gracefully slipped in to cynicism
like a robe made of glass
It’s a lot easier to
say you may never fall asleep
beside anything but the wall
if while you do, you laugh. I
wish you knew
how few things I believed in
before I believed in you.
But I could already feel
these fists unclench
the night we met
I changed my pillow cases.
I didn’t need to erase
my eyelids again. They’re
wide open now
I can only barely remember
what they once said.
The robes I wore
are burnt and
forgotten
The first time I got dressed
after meeting you
it was all linen. Soft
like I had forgotten how to know.
I was writing poems to
pray that you existed
before I ever knew you or
knew this
I knew I was looking for your eyes against mine.
I just didn’t know
what they would look like.
And I don’t believe in resurrection
but I do believe in redemption
and you pulled out of me
the man who needed to be saved.
So I renamed love after you
It’s a small thankfulness
for reminding me
that it existed.
the sieve and the sand 
definitely more and more interested in this tara character… a real person? or just your proverbial dream woman? I wrote poems to ‘Gabe’ for years… before i met my ridiculously awesome wife…..
rewrote a bunch of them, but didn’t need to change much but the name for her… turns out she was so much better than i anticipated my poems were mostly understatements
Glad I can keep the interest, because I’ve yet to run out of poems to write about her still. Tara is, in all honesty, a combination of both. The real person I met who turned out to be my dream woman, stepping straight out of proverb.
And I understand that quite well now, and that’s really a very beautiful story. I’ve been going through a lot of my older poems recently, and keep on finding lines that were describing Tara before we ever had met. Now I’m making attempts at describing the real deal, and I hope some day maybe I could even get close, but so far, there is nothing I can say to describe her that would begin to do justice.