temporarily unavailable

If time is a convincing illusion, then as I am writing this,
you are reading it; you are remembering me years after
we have spoken last, and I am noticing you for the first time.

I'm a young woman waking up in an apartment in Albany,
New York, realizing that I am finally broken enough to fix,
and an East Boston moppet in ***** pink overalls, riding
Big Wheels through the sprinklers with a boy named John Henry.

You're delivering newspapers on a cold New Hampshire morning.
I am falling asleep wondering if you could possibly love me.
You are saying that you do. You are stardust, and I am long gone.

For the same reasons that I stay hungry
for dinner and tired for bed, I keep my
heart a little lonely for poetry; that way,
I can imagine your weathered hands against
my pale thighs as clinging starfish – my
fingernails, bleached cockleshells washed up
on the barely evening beach of your back.

crisp is no longer the word
for 8 am and the weak white sun—
the leaves have run out of green
so their veins fill with
blood instead—

when my body protests from underneath
my sweater (too
thin) i
drive back home to my
heart
h and the vague possibility of
soup

i.
In Toronto, we could lean out the kitchen window
and steal pears from the neighbor's tree.

ii.
It was the first time I had seen my sister in years.
We climbed a hill to pick wild plums.

iii.
He said I'll eat one if you do.
We laughed around our crabapple kisses.

This is a lonely poem,
a half an hour before dawn poem,
a poem like an empty kitchen –
a godforsaken (god, I'm shaking)
feeling like I just want to go home
poem. (and I am home)

It's been a week; I know you said
sometimes it may be hard to write.
I understand, I really do –
I've been very busy, too,
learning how to sleep at night
and falling out of love with you.

If this poem is like our love
(and the sky as
clear)

then it will rise like a rocket
and stop short,
here.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Think, small heart.

Don't say
sad eyes know things.

Don't say
hurt things make poems.

I raised you wrong,
told you lies to console you.
Now you speak in five cent fortunes.

Now you don't know anything.