Gentle is time to be gentle.
—Ole Dalby, private correspondence
Gentle is time to be gentle,
he writes, and I let myself
fall into the cadence of his words
the way as a girl I once dreamt
I could fall into a cloud—
something soft beyond soft,
something infinitely calm.
Gentle is time to be gentle,
he writes, and though
my mind struggles to decipher it,
my body instantly nestles
into the tenderness of it,
as if he has wrapped each word
in cumulonimbus, as if gentleness
is the only obvious path, as if I, too,
might offer such gentleness
to someone else with words
spun of nimbostratus, with syllables
of cirrus, with thoughts as cushiony
as the clouds we once drew as kids,
those clouds we once lived in
before we were told we could not.