I can play an E-minor chord, I tell him.
I can play the cello, he tells me. He smiles with half his mouth
and I kiss him again.

It’s getting late and I’m measuring
the time by the five minute steel guitar and the five minute steel guitar
and we both know where I’d rather be but here—
here is okay too.
His hands are different, but they will do.

coffee appendicitis and baby tragedies
a toxic fixation and his nineteen fifties apathy
his clothes hung loosely over you.

you are sleeping on his bedsheets but your own bed
they smell like him but feel like you (**** them)


and you can listen to him smile through the door


but you cannot open it.

he caught her eye across the diner. put a quarter in the jukebox.
told her to choose a song, on him. she giggled and chose
the rolling stones. he said "take a walk with me"
they walked through the woods where the highway had been
before the flood in 1994.

talking like new yorkers talk but softer he took her
hand and he said "let's skip rocks let's get hot"
and soon she couldn't separate the smell of damp grass and sundown
from the smell of ***.

he said "let's play car-and-driver" and she told him that the
dented white sedan belonged to a waitress,
the rusty pickup to a cook, the black lexus to a businessman.
he said "you're good at this" and she blushed.

he kissed her very violently on the drive away. the sky was orange
and it drizzled.

as i skate my fingers over your
pale abdomen
deliberately, so as not to break you
i feel the quiet and the still that has
settled over us, like the makeshift
bedsheet picnic blanket in spring

we move slowly, as if we were a
flashback or a dream
and i think that our bodies
were made for this--
just this

for this languor and
the unending of it

In my geographic corner, where it rains most often,
when it does not, I remember you
on the face of the rocks, lightfooted on the oracles
amongst the bobcats and the butterflies
and the sunshowers like curtains from real.
Years ago, but minutes; miles, no—
I cannot deny the miles.

I open my window on this spring morning and I
taste Delphi in the air, and you,
you everywhere.

my natural eye, and your new hip moon
and your hips, sharp hip bones and forgetting that
I could use somebody—
you never forget

the floor with imperceptible scratches
our bootsoles tracking cold sand and—

where we buried the key
you never forget

I like when you sneak glances
at my paper, at my tongue

I miss the shudder in my knees when
we passed the City skyline
it was better than the first time

you never forget