I'll see you around, but
                                    not again on this empty floor,

the two of us in blankets, slept on our clothes,
woodgrain just out of reach.

Waiting at the station,
the 5 a.m. trolley home,
hands wrapped around my fare,

There's some memory of a dingy lastnight bar
where we chain-smoked through
the muted stop-motion of late-night,
whiskey breath and fingertips,
tracing the side of a face, the ends of nerves,

lost

in the traffic river crowd footfall,
at some patio latenight coffeehouse,
we were cinematic, mysterious under
the mercury lights that lit the sidewalk, that staged us

full, small, like hands wrapped around a cup with our name on it.

Seventy-nine days ago I walked home in early
September wearing a smell
of you.


       You said once, while massaging my back,
                   tense and fickle, but folding
             under your hands;
      “We're all off ***. It's a matter of increments.”

Today, moving back and forth in this building
It's rough-cut stone walls a consolation,    

I think, borderline obsessively,

You don't know what to do
with a woman like me,
do you?