and so you go
emptying the room, Evening/Morning
playing on the small, grey radio.

it is not in the way you navigate with the most immense
of eyes I have seen,
whose lips torn with shade have said always,

this
was meant to
fall – when yellow trees outlast greener ones,
i cannot.
we cannot.
you cannot.

and many before me, all the doors have closed
shut, voices cornerless searching for flesh.
i thought it would **** when you first moved
back to where we were once trapped,
like an arcade fire waiting to confide in smoke.

at last, the books can now be read –
first to go are words, and yet in the next moment,
we will not let each other be
strangled with days,
            years, spurning, striding out of windows.

our discomfitures are made clear
when I dug my hands deep into the grave of your own,
and in pure wonderment, neither the lights flinched
nor the darkness congealed – it is only enough
   that when you closed your eyes, they will never
open to me any longer: our waiting has only become
  our most obvious limitations and we have been
  held    we have been taken in     we have fallen in
      we have learned each other    we have unlearned each other

and somewhere in the next room,
   a door slams – someone is tiptoeing masterfully not to topple
  the Victorian, not to
startle the oncoming  shadow of the transfixed   furniture,
        careful enough    not to still the voices   that I long for
and fracture     this man,    this being    myself   and all that staleness.

it is the wrong  voice in the evening
   and only the silence impales with   surgery-precision.
they   all   have feet    thighs    calves
   drunk in merriment   looking at their lacquered   nails
fixing their    stockings   and lamenting their men
     in   all the   roominghouses    of the world there   are but
  silences    that ought    to be     fragmented

   but     not   tonight – there they go marching like   a sad
  army waving farewell   with bayonets in   their hands swaying   like
   light from a candle’s  anxious  flame-tip – and they promise   me
   kisses    and they tell me    temporal   splendors   I have no use for
     it is    not your    tenderness     of   your     being    here
     but the    assault    of your     being     somewhere  else.