We are essentially unknowable, she says
and laughs.
I’ve lived with the same man
for thirtyoddyears
and he’s basically a stranger.

A stranger that occupies
her bed,
her body
her kitchen table.
They eat oatmeal out of stoneware bowls
washing them over and over
traces of their spit
mixing together
in the lukewarm dish water.

He clears the sink
of the bloated grey solids
that remain there once the water has drained.
They are so similar
two magnets aligned  
as they’ve drawn closer
the space left between
grown smaller but harder.

A question rings red as a tuning fork struck.
The spreading halo glows it's ache
through the tunnels of the head
hammer, mallet, and shell
all shimmer in concert
I am awash in it's ripples
and my mouth fills
with the iron taste of rust.
There is metal in it all
in blood and in dirt
and there in the tone
as my own blood aligns redly
along it’s sharp edge
traces embedded
in the weather and in my veins
charged, polar, always pushing
at the the insulation
the condensing division
the gulf

Make your love unspeakably wild she told me
like the textures of your nakedness
in the dripping sun and blinding water
when its late, late august
before the first damp morning
when you can’t deny
that the real heat is gone from the night.
It's ok to be sentimental if
it keeps the buzz in your ears
in this nowish spot in time
when there’s less and less
to draw you out of your nest.
There’s every excuse for this dullness
after a quick seven years
the weight of it shows in your face
on your grandfather’s heavy brow.
You both wondered
why you sometimes felt like strangers in this place
and why the sweetness of brome
can send you reeling in the dusk.
Seven years gleaned of their mornings
like so many beans in a bright steel pan.
Arriving late and later still
I felt the dawns irredeemable chill
and in the bluest of October afternoons, she said,
may your love be unspeakably wild.

I'm getting along
without you verywell yes
I am except when

I moved,       and I found,
a dusty tennis ball of
the dogs under the

couch       that he forgot
accidentally. His dumb snout
is what I do miss,

it's not you, though I
could use a hand lifting the
old blue couch, true,

but other than that
I'm getting along without you
very well as I

catch in a damp rag
flakes of tawny onion husk.
     Fridge drawer corners

     full of our old crumbs.
I'll clear that skin away,
and just kid the moon.

The body remembers, though it has been
four years since the summer you shattered your
knee but still limped out across the continent
to Boston to see him you idiot and
this is the fourth summer you've placed between
yourself and the last pin and the last *****
your body remembers, though in the
torturous lengthening of fused and toughened tissues
the bad leg is finally catching up,
and the scar with its ten numb inches of
puckered track has come to fade bone white
against your skin
but it’s still stored somewhere
in your sockets or cells and when you fall off your bike you still cry
Though you’re not really hurt your body remembers
So that when you’re confronted with their engagement photo
(you didn’t even know he was seeing anyone)
the darkened garden at the Plymouth Plantation
begins to bloom up around you before you can stop it
like a seizure or a vision, and you’re there again
trespassing after him through shadowy pines
and night-damp atlantic air
to where the white chairs encircle the altar.

seen from overhead
tributaries intertwine
seeping through the dust

tangerine rivers
honeyed, milky, candy bright
ooze abundantly

warmly encroaching
burdening the soil with their
sugary varnish

I better remember your kiss
Than the taste itself.
Perhaps it was purple velvet:
It was a death worth dying for.
I better feel your hands that
Must have just returned from a trip
To the north pole:
It was bright red.
I better smell the sulfur from
My wounded heart.
You've must have just returned
From those pits.

None of this is fair though.
I made you, without permission,
My warrior with Greek blood.
You were my Achilles.
This way and that.
You were all and null.

I better write you a midnight sonnet.
It will survive where our love didn't;
With honesty.