Is this emptiness
or cosmic space

a love for dark or consummate
absence?

You lay there
and I, here
in the same
tangential uniformity.

we are but together
splintered, then separate,
making no difference.

you, in your place
and I, in mine

like some unattended baggage
dragged mechanically
by a tireless conveyor,

a hound in pursuit
of its own tail in intense circles,

left to my own silence brought
to the brink of all the noise.

*

The morning with its peripatetic
crush of garlic and spry birds.

In an unassuming distance
strip to void, teased to rogue,
the light does not arrive with
its usual taciturn warmth;

your mother gives you a pear
to pare and ******,

my mother, the same in giving,
yet another thing worth grazing

say, the old skeleton of an empty
wine bottle,

a cold stride past womb-tender
bungalows and sleep-shaped mailboxes.
the feel of its bone , gutted out of flesh.

a compelling strike of silence
permeates more silence – like a prayer thumbed
down to its last throng.

there will be no dialogue.
this is the same quietude
in miles that assume our places.

maybe once you knew this domicile
like the curve of your bow-leg,
or the glint of your inner thigh.

the word “love” falls flat on the surface,
taking its station amongst the masses,
flying with the birds soon dead in their tracks.
the word “love” slits,
cuts open, unloosening a wound,

your mother in the kitchen paring
the flesh from the bone,

and you hear it,

as we look out of separate windows,
the hush churning sound,
spreading on all fours once in this room.

the morning lays out its hairbreadth
wire of memory

in some place unknown to us,
to size the measure our own,
still yet not ours, you in your home,

and I, somewhere outside the world
fathoming shadows their own things not ours.