Indigo by Kyoko Uchida

Kyoko Uchida

Indigo by Kyoko Uchida

T.

I am determined to not talk about you.

How fast a thing unravels

, yes — but how I spend years unraveling still.

Indigo

Kyoko Uchida

What I see now in our snapshots

together is the hole in your T-shirt,

a torn seam at your left shoulder, dark

in the sun. Already up close, you can see

the indigo thread coming out, and this is

what worries me, how fast a thing

unravels. From the loose weave of what

covers us, touches our freckled skin, we are

open to desire or absence.

We count on the way our clothes keep us

together, separate and intact,

though we know better. We are

no closer beneath the careful fabric,

the small, easy buttons — only more

honest, unyielding, foreign. Nor are we

any safer, any more beyond touch

across heavy cotton, a white linen sleeve.

And if the distance we’ve sewn together

is thin, what begins to give

has been there all along: always

how things come apart into their own

basic pieces, all texture and hue of color,

all fiber and cut and bone, where

we are most ourselves revealed.

This time I want to take each unbroken

thread between my fingers, worrying it,

undoing slowly what I know to follow

where it takes me, how it ends.

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