I noticed that you left a footprint on my patio
the brand of your sneaker stamped across it, it was the shape of North America
and that’s where you were, quietly moving through
my little city, my little between-the-ears
my little muscles, contracting with the thought of you
expanding like the thought of you
when you are gone, and I only see the ghost of your misshapen bootsole
it moves faster than a train, and I only know that you are in North America
and it is too big to find your small quick step
but I sometimes remember that you are North America
and then I feel you everywhere.

glossy paper—I don’t have any glossy paper, I panic
I cannot do you justice on carbon, so I do you no justice
and rely on shaky memory for your being-gone
your gone-ness, your not-here

it comes and goes but it comes, it comes more often
and it’s like when you think there’s water in your cup
but there isn’t, and you lift it, and it goes above your head
and it’s a bruise on your gums from a bread-crust you don’t remember
and when you leave your favorite shirt at your summer home
and the housekeeper takes it quietly

I can’t look at you without the proper paper
I can’t look at you at all
I can’t do you justice in your not-here
and I don’t trust my eyes
to see you after

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.