Your Eyes

I've been trying to describe your eyes for six years and I keep getting it wrong. Brown, the records say. But "brown" is what you call a color when you've stopped looking. Your eyes are the brown of coffee before the cream— that first undiluted moment when the cup holds something serious. Your eyes are the brown of old library shelves— the ones that have held so many stories they've started to absorb them. When you're angry, they go darker— espresso, molasses, the deep end of a well where the water stops reflecting and starts keeping secrets. When you laugh, they catch light like honey— suddenly golden, suddenly warm, suddenly the most deliberate color in the room. I know: eyes are the cliché. Poets have been writing about eyes since poets have been writing about anything. But yours— yours are why they started. Someone, thousands of years ago, looked at someone the way I look at you and thought: I need a word for this. And the word they found was "poem." Your eyes. Not brown. Never just brown. The color that started all of this.