Help Me Remember I Love You

Tell me, with your eyes open
and lips undone of her name,
that breathing is not
missing her, and this skin is
not a monument to the way
she moved atop you.
Tell me, the wind breaks into us,
all the same.
Tell me, we are not products
of those who have
loved us, wrong.
Even with my hands still trying
to find steadiness in all this
ocean, tell me we learned how
to build structures of
survival the day we were promised
the ground could not
always hold us. Tell me, “You know this,
already.”
Is the mountain we fear we will
rip open our knees
trying to appeal to, already gone
beneath us?