Who here hasn’t been someone else’s careful prayers on fire? Please don’t write again.

Even I’ve said, “I won’t take I won’t take no for an answer for an answer,” right after I’ve said,
“Don’t ask. Beg.”

Turns out I’ve become the heavy luggage of cameras and spring a friend’s lost in a done decade.
But believe me even in this dark we hear the same bent music.
Do you remember when

we went nowhere alone. I often went without myself but not always. I still feel at home
there, the street where a girl told me she felt like a reason to rush into the night.
Like leaving, nothing there’s ever finished.

But asked to give a compendium on the tenderness of those days, the only there and then
I’d swear to, I’d call it What we talk about when we talk about
“What we talk about when we talk about love.”
(Elsewhere, but at least still glittering we thought.
At least we thought then, Ray. I too do what I can.)
Literature burned. Our eyes fire-dyed green. The stories all sky sized.

I left home and came back home.

I left for the fall for the country and slept next to Liana in flannel on the kerosene-heated porch.
I came home to Newark again and friends arrived gently, poor and impossibly gorgeous at the door.

The story goes the table can’t hold the chandelier’s stars such dust I’m telling you the story goes.

There’s no honest way to arrange the bouquet of lightning
those memories assemble in me this morning.

Just too many crushed thoughts to bury in eternity
I can’t do anything but genuflect in front of them—

What do you think this isn’t, impossible?

I remember how she smelled like a commercial lavender farm. Minor stars. I always wanted
a fistful of that expensive haircut she refused to shake out.

That other one was brave too early in the century. Remember him.

*On the ride out of town she sung about how it’s still yesterday on the moon.
How whatever’s gone’s still out there somewhere.

Tonight, I would disappear if you would
only put your hands away.
The trailers on fire here, country
music boxes for the moon to tinker with.
That moon with one knee
bone deep in each of us, each of us
half of this altar.
The moon on borrowed fire
with the lost snow of minor wishes.
The moon using you like a shovel
to bury January in what I’ll admit years later
is my blood forever. For now,
I’m a bracelet of words for you,
for if only and since then,
a bracelet of words for the black gravity
of your bones asleep
with nothing but your jewelry on. Tighten me
until you feel your heart thud back.
Silver then green then a sentence
that ends in your name. Then
another sentence ends in your name.
When you feel me fall through you
like snow into roses, no, slowly
start to roughen your dark edges
like some rusted tongue
in the ribs of a bell,
hold me like the news,
where more and more of everything’s on fire,
where the prayers fall through
the fingers of language like ash
into your name and other ornaments of failure.

I take the soft earlobe of the mirror between my teeth, whisper here’s breath, lost fog cluttering the glass ear like a prayer. I want to write something down in it. Beg for it and watch it disappear. The way we need each other. Ask things like against what does never shatter. Do you remember when endlessness slipped off the chant of the sea like a shredded gown and stepped into me like a ghost through the wall? If you don’t believe me, put your ear in my mouth like it’s an empty shell and listen. Let the planes explode heavenward until we learn to love  the sky’s preference for silence. When a friend died I looked up and said you’ll need the rest of us if you want to stay named  heaven. So why don’t we let wishes chew up all the star that’s left. Let the boardwalk stay driftwood for the rest of these from now on days, ever since the inevitable spit it out like broken gold teeth. And let the salt air kiss the Ferris wheel to sleep as it kneels down like a broken horse in the hush of Jersey surf. Let one more suicide empty the beach so quickly the dark goes right on singing without you. Let the casino lights down south keep right on banging on the door of sky and darken, shine and shine let go, flicker like if only, if only. You need a chapel of bone for an echo like that to come home to. I need you like money, love, more when you’re gone and I’m alone. Most when it’s so late it’s early and so far into Ohio. When you stride through me the way a child’s hand trails through tips of bent grass like a ribbon. The way the past moves through us like a drive through movie we glimpse only from the interstate. When your twinkling house keys snow the unsaid like most last words into my open hands.