What parts of us do we frequent? What tuning do we
sleep to? What was it like to love you? Remember.
I don't. I feel unfinished - and somehow young -
We are greatly sad, we are gently lost and leaning
in doorways and listening to piano music that
saturates our clothing and catches on the locks
we are ghosting ourselves, never responding to last
questions, standing ourselves up for dinner so that,
when we come to, we find our vacant bodies bending
into the yellow light of the fridge in a dark kitchen
at some neglected time of night
we run out of milk and make the best of it
we run out of hope and make a collect call
to the last place we saw it
wondering if it's draped its bony body over
the divan, a copy of some lessor Dostoevsky
in one hand and a cigarette in the other
and then the world turns around and astonishes us
I saw a man who reminded me of you in the card
section while I was lost amongst the vegetables
considering the price of beets and all the different shades
of green, and I thought this man, he is older than the
last time I saw you but that you are older than the last
time I saw you and so am I
A child walked by with a fire hat and said hello
and I floated toward to the deli.
I didn't wake up until that night in the middle
of a dream in which you and your lover had moved
into a dark house with low ceilings and narrow hallways,
a raised ranch, right across from my mother's house
and I couldn't understand who you were now. I kept looking
for the boy I knew who studied maps and communism and
art history now and then. I kept asking God where he went.
The dream went on all night until I made peace with this loss,
and just as I did you walked by and held your pointer and thumb
finger together as if to say "I was this close to coming to you"
and I couldn't speak for fear of crying but I looked at you as if to say
"I was here the whole time, waiting" but I know that's not the
story you know or the dreams you have and I know now that
your stories and your dreams are no less true than mine
When I woke it was fall and the leaves were already
carpeting the ground and the milkweed was floating
and the hawk that my mother believes to be my father
was perched over the fence you built, watching the clouds.
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