It arrived in silence.

The sound came after
the suffering,

after the pain had nested quietly
within the cold cage
of bone,

after the heart was brimming
with the burden
of you.

There could be no resolution
because the beginning
was broken

and so our story
could never

bloom.

but suppose it’s not a river
suppose instead you are laying
down bricks one by one
and with each new brick
all the old ones stack up
behind you to form a wall
so you can see all the bricks
that got you here -
the city you chose
and the love you didn’t -
but you can never return
you can only gaze at the choices -
the ones you’re glad you made
and the ones you wish you hadn’t -
and sometimes it was not even your own
hand but that of another and it seems
unfair that such blocks must remain
that their permanence is not yours
to claim but if you stare here too long
you will never recognize the clearing
behind you and all the places still left
to travel so where will you go from
                                                                 here?

We did not always feel such insistent tugging
on the sleeve and so we did not remember
to cherish time until the moment had passed,
the memory marooned,
its breath grown short within
the parentheses of its existence.

The air itself is tender
when I offer myself
to the tenuous moment,
a nest of softness in the rainy
daylight.  I do not know
how to be the person I am
becoming, but I want to find
meaning in the deliberate punctuation
of your sighs, in the dead fluttering
of wings, in the undercurrent
of something missing. To find
that the bigger moments
are incidental.  To find
that my biggest regret
is living my days as regrettable.

There was a year in your life
when your music abandoned
     you and you

     found no meaning in your ink-
     stained history, her scent ghosting

over the creased sheets
of memory.  But when you ceased
     to choke out the vowels

     of her name you were no longer weighed
     down by the heavier things. Did you

know it then?  How you could believe
in something and still fail
     to live up to it?

    How there could be no meaning in flight
    without clouds to gauge your distance?

1

Time did not exist
under the cleaved
marrow of moon
while you sighed
away the hours

2

Sometimes when he looked
at you you felt the weight
of your suffering reflected
in his fossilized eyes

3

He opened his heart
without giving it away
and how startled you were
by the coldness you found there

4

Often you felt
like little more
than the afterthought
of a peppermint

5

Like the leaves you were unaware
of your transience you could not see
the end the fluttering then the limpness

6

In history you are always viewed
through the lens of your mistakes.

When you came to me
I was too tangled
in the moment
to unknot your strings
of lies.  Too eager to collect
the words cascading
from your easy
grin.  Perhaps you prefer
me fragile and a little
helpless, fingers hovering
along the fluted edge
of a dream.  But in the morning
your eyes flickered
like candlelight, their warmth
tapering in a ribbon
of smoke.