Pulling off my scarf
letting it drape like a resignation
across the back of a chair
The sun is setting
the room is dim
and almost orange –  and is
sometimes lonely
in its loss of day

I think of you now –  

and then

We were walking with our arms around each other

Always...

through the Boston Common
The air drizzled
with late-winter
melts
the cobbles
wet
The sounds of our steps
go on –  

Forever....

I turn to hang my coat

Night replaces you again
__


1-29-18

—loneliness; and watching the graphite
scratch and scatter into
moonlight, you spread through
the inky sea and swim up
through the angled crests
of understanding: while you
remember last night's stars,
i stand and stare at the
colours of our ending.

for displacement of
covers matches the rising, the
floating of your soul — the green
fades to thinner pines and
wilted evergreens, while the snow
piles and clusters in cones:
up to grey, then
small, then
white.

softness flows over
rocks and rivulets, jettisoning
the clouding embraces of treetops,
holding the modulating fog on brushed canvases:
away, floating away, currents of love.

falling and constant,
one window purple with feeling,
the other dark and lifeless;
do your branches creak in the same wind?
will the feathers and flowers that you blew into the morning
ever find a home?

while the holocene climaxes
through empty, breezing streets (seeing
your leaves and flowers wither and curl on the two-edged
backlane, loose gravel and overhanging apartments looming
like sharp needlepoints of darker grey)
drops, just streams, coalesce on dark green leaves,
dirt scatters on the phosphorescent, forgotten film—imperceptibly,
rain blurs your lonely photographs (i hold

them in boxes and under books, and
gaze at scrawls where your hand once touched, and
ponder at surfaces where your mind once wandered, and
shadow them on my heart, and
shatter them on my memories).

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.
Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!
I hear her great heart purr.

From her lips ampersands and percent signs
Exit like kisses.
It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.
What am I to make of these contradictions?
I wear white cuffs, I bow.

Is this love then, this red material
Issuing from the steele needle that flies so blindingly?
It will make little dresses and coats,

It will cover a dynasty.
How her body opens and shuts --
A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!

O heart, such disorganization!
The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.
ABC, her eyelids say.

where
love sleeps on goosefeathers and moonlight moors,
withering on the solemn slopes of moss and

heather where
hummingbirds climb on raindrops,
sailing on the pattering and

puddling where
fog layers on hillsides, augmenting
the shades of evergreen, folded and

ambient where
light shines through panelled oak and
purrs with the howl of the lonely sun, speckled and

blurred where
you sigh, narrowly, and long for the tides
beyond forty-five degrees (where it's

cold, i think) where
lorries stop to breathe and you
step, i think, to be closer to magic
and further from me.

whiter upon the flowing, her sounds
rested in morning coffee and echoed
in wildflower honey. i remembered her in
halcyon hues: she
folded down; i crossed and uncrossed;
she smiled at my clumsy ramblings and
i watched the lingering, icy
windshield.