Wild and heaving, I
Strip the room of its contents
with the violence of a young fawn
learning to stand.
Limbs fling glass and furniture to the floor,
where it shatters and lies
open like a question.

Oh how I loved him, young man of twenty two,
Not entirely at home in his old-fashioned clothes
and inherited beliefs.
We were only children when we searched
through fields and under leaves
for the face of god.

Arms wrap heavy around me like swaddling
--or a pall
As I shake and claw at that
impossibly blue sky.

I am twirling under the soft dome
Of a street lamp
Spinning in and out of shadows
At the border of
Can’t quite
Moonless night
Where have you gone,
Second sight?

I am alone now, and happier for it.
When they tell you that you will be happier later,
Do they ever consider that
Trees spin
Chipped chin
Table-spin
On broken limb.

The ground is cooler than
my refrigerator,
and more genuine.

I want to believe that it started in
innocence—my perceiving your pain and
relating it to my own,
feeling an outpouring of love for you
in your loneliness,
wanting to touch you there.
Or perhaps it was always an avoidance:
a refusal to face
my own loneliness,
my pain,
that incessant pressing against my own small,
cramped circle of awareness.
But the loneliness, the loneliness!
I must have felt it so acutely—we both must have.

When did we first make the contract?
When did we first decide to grow within
each other instead of within ourselves?
I am crying here, wondering.
Do people do this regularly?
Is it permanent?
Will it be pulling at me, forever, patiently
waiting for me to follow you
into that small,
bleak spot of earth?

You call me darling, but:
Darling,  
do not call me by that name,
I could not bear it if I tried.
That word is a pyre, and I—
I do not know how to burn
well enough.

Until I can swallow your absence whole
and live,
I will not lay a hand on you:
You who call me out of my trembling cloak
Of skin and muscle and bones,
Into the lissome folds of that tender night
To meet you.

Until I can meet your gaze without encountering some
small death,
I will not try to hold you:
weightless one,
Who I could never quite grasp anyway.

Until I can kiss your lips and remember
Where you end and I begin
I will not get lost in you:
Constellation of nerves and veins and sinews,
Strewn across the stars.


I have tried to love,
weightlessly,
But my heart is still heavy, my dear.

And I have tried to love you,
desperately,
Without the heaviness of desire
or the desperation of need,
But I have lost all substance on the pyre
Of self-denial, for indemnity.

Tonight I tried to find the sun beyond horizon bare,
But when I climbed atop a hill I found but blackness there.

The moon, accomplice to this lack, held darkness in her gaze;
What water dark and somnolent did swallow her bright haze?  

Her solemn limbs and vacant eyes were phantoms to behold:
Pray do come down and spare your crown, for I grow tired and cold!