"prelude to processional"

i want you to feel my breath upon your skin
long after we've parted. i want to impress
myself upon your sensibilities. i want to find
strands of your hair on my jacket. i want to smell
a stranger's perfume in a crowded supermarket
and be crushed by the thought of you. i want to laugh
at your jokes hours, even days, after you've told them.
i want to bask in the afterglow of your admiration.
i want you to feel in your bones the same ache that i feel in
mine. and when that happens, i hope we both have the
good sense not to wait for more signs and symbols and figures
to tell us what we both know is true. when that happens,
let us tell our folks and choose our rings and get on
with the business of marriage and kids and arguing and
making up and building beauty and breathing poetry
and destroying our narcissisms, each for the other, so
that we can make it to "as long as we both shall live" with
some life left with which to enjoy it all