Dear forehead opening to a peephole of thought, dear

warm palm on which the cube of ice does not melt.

Dear hands criss-crossed by cuts of the paper-thin grasses

you have planted, dear sensation at the back of my neck,

dear realization of equilibrium, dear

irrational realization.

Dear strata of elixirs whose properties contradict

each other, erasing one hundred perfect blisters

from your lips, dear boxes of flooded books, dear

weeping tree with furred red leaves.

Dear neighbor who embellishes your surfaces

with scratchmarks, dear south veering west, dear

migrant sleeper, dear vestigial third set of teeth. 

Dear

beloved of a maned and quixotic creature whose

prehensile paws guide your caresses.  Dear deafness

before the sign of running water, dear benign

bone islands, dear

salve rubbed into the neck of a lover,

dear arm of the Begin Anywhere tributary, dear

impervious to sedatives. Dear not as in heart but

as in aortic congestion. 

Dear what might pull the leash forward, throwing

the shadow back to its anomalous source.

Dear, dearer, dearest—wrong. Rather

dear dearing, deared, will have deared, dear

to be.  Dear transtemporal conjugation.