"The sun does not set into the petrified forest, it bleeds out! Fire fading painting the splintered trunks in hues of violated watercolor.!"

The Theory is:

A love that would petition the glaciers to halt their crawl, not for the world, but to preserve the perfect fossil of your footprint in the mud.

A devotion that would re-route a river through the chambers of my own heart, just to power the little millwheel of your smile.

I would learn the language of the lichen that slowly consumes the headstones, just to whisper your name with the patience of absolute decay.

This love is not a feeling; it is a permanent alteration of the local ecology. It is the introduction of a beautiful, non-native species that chokes out all other life, until the entire landscape answers only to you.

(Drop / Breakdown)

(Verse 2)

Practice:

My boot crushes a cluster of bright, fool's-cap mushrooms.—Their death smells like stale rain and nothing.

(Verse 3)

I packed two oranges. Mine is 'pithy' and dry. Yours remains in the bag, I say it is;

"a perfect, uneaten sun."

I point to the vultures circling a thermal. "Look," –I say.– "They're dancing." –You squint with disinterest and said. . .—"it's probably a dying deer."

(Verse 4)

The theory carves your initials into the bark of a two-hundred-year-old oak, a scar that will weep sap for seasons.

(Verse 5)

The practice is me, using my thumbnail to worry a hangnail, staring at the same tree, wondering if it’s sick.

(Verse 6)

The theory is a symphony played on the strands of a spiderweb strung with morning dew.

(Verse7)

The practice is the sound of a single drop falling onto a leaf—a tiny, damp punctuation in a sentence going nowhere.

"In Theory:"–

I romanticize the notion of our skeletons being found half-submerged in a bog, our finger bones eternally intertwined, a monument to peat and perseverance! . .

(Verse9)

"In practice:"—

I am a man who forgot to bring a towel, sitting on a cold rock at the edge of a lake, watching you skip stones. You ask what I'm thinking about. I say "geology," but I'm thinking about the chill, and the way the water looks like a sheet of dirty aluminum.

(Breakdown:)

So this is the cartography of us: a map where the theory is a continent of glorious, impossible mountains, and the practice is the small, 'X' of this damp rock I occupy.

The love is in the catastrophic beauty of the lightning-struck pine, burning from the inside out.

The indifference is in the slow, sure knowledge that the rain will eventually put it out.

(Outro)

And the most terrifying, romantic understanding is that both are true at once. The fire is beautiful. The rain is a mercy. And I am here, watching both, loving you more than the fire and less effectively than the rain.