Indigo by Kyoko Uchida

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.