axis, bold as love

23 Degrees

the axis I am standing on,
tilted twenty three degrees,
tilted away from the sun,
and so then, am I

left to calculate
the degrees of separation
between us,
if you leave.

my shadow,
spinning askew,
alone and fading
under a cold december sun,
dipping by degrees toward
a hemisphere where everything runs backwards,

where maybe you'd be coming back to me,
our shadows strong, together, and tilted toward the sun.

Gao Xingjian's silhouette and his shadow, Marseille, 2003
by Alain Melka/Jean-Louis Darmyn