Kayla M. Carcone

haecceity for beginners

your this-ness your what-it is-ness and the-way-it-is-not-that-ness
how your face is never and always exactly what I see when you
snatch the hand mirror away and inspect every shape and line,
made completely new in all its been-done-ness but not-quite-this-way-ness
when I am asked to take the detail and run with it, to knead that
this into something concrete and dictionary instead of the fizz
of a shaken pepsi that-it is-ness, you become an idea built
from words spoken over a million dinner tables when I know you
to be the unexplainably tangerine feeling that breezes through the
reed-like hair on my arms & makes me shiver in a moment of uncontrol.
instinctively, I wonder if someone just stomped all over my grave, or
if you are a folklore all your own, all bug-eyed warning & fate-sealing prophecy.
I could stare at you all day and become more deliciously unsure. you are like that
patrick swayze song, the one from dirty dancing, the one about the wind –
and you are also not, because the moment I assign anything to the mad rabbit,
it shuffles into focus, into something you already understand, when really
it’s the indescribable this-ness that makes me run full-speed to follow you,
past the garden gate, into forever.