https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omhHQ2mVWXU

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.

Summer gathered her children 
and rowed all the boats to the edge

of the land and waited for the darkening 
so she could close her torn hands.

She hung her apron from the moon 
and stretched her body over the horizon. 

She sang a song we couldn't hear. 

We all die when she does - 

her lonely suckling at stars
her green complaint against the sky

a reckoning. 

There are things moving we can't see
my mother says

wood beams in houses that contract
rocks rising through dirt

I said "pin nah chey" and you said
"it's pinawsh" and I folded the correct
pronunciation and a silver shame
into the bird cage of my chest

I remember something as a rose petal -
either your mouth of my nipple -
and the bed was so hard I remember
sleep as a plumb line

and there were train tracks in that
room with us in a weak white light
and speakeasy doors

Can you remember the password?
It's important in case anyone takes our
body and wears it around as a costume
at galas or bars or tea parties

my neck is strained from looking for you

I hear my voice in your head as a silver bell

I hope your sciatic nerve has stopped choking you
I hope your body has worked itself to joy
And I hope when you dream of me
I am walking towards you with all my bones
exposed

I take things and lay them out to dry

they are long and I can't see them

not yet

they will take shape and become

when they dry

and I will continue to stir things

with wooden spoons and love

with my very porous heart

and the grass will grow sharper

and the shadows will gather

to whisper about the coming

change

There are things I would like to say to you
and my legs are tight with them

my muscles want to say things to you too -
that line you like so much on my thigh

is even more defined now.

These things, they have collected inside me
swelling my belly for a time but now

they sneak out in my sweat and I find your name
familiar again, in the tongue of my mind.

I was a memory you didn't have -
 a feeling in the gut when you woke

and you were a ghost of yourself on the other side
of a glass wall, your eyes bowls of hurt

the way I imagine they looked as a child,
your blond head tilted to a sky that would only rain,

your ears filling with drops until
the world was a muted song.

i will stay so close

that my prayers
are a whisper

in His ear

i will stay so still
that i hear

when your
breath changes

i'll watch the sheet
on the line tremble

as if in wind
and know

your lungs
are full of air

again

Surfeit, Respite

You think you're such a creature of habit, but now that you've stocked up on the hand soap
you loved so much, don't you feel a little bit trapped? A little bit like you didn't mean it when
you said "love"?

Perhaps it's better to let some things die on the vine. That way, they don't become hangovers.

Lying on the bathroom floor and then throwing up three times the next day, that was all just a metaphor.

There's something about clean sheets and lying in them alone that you can't quite give up, not yet, no matter how much you "love" the hand soap, or his jaw line, or the way his skin smells after hours
of working your body.