much that I rue this place,
you are this night’s bleak behemoth –
your full volume of absence
displaces the air.

where darkness asserts its terrors,
the heart knows no clearing;
stroke slow at first say, accuracy
  of all knives absorbed or when you
said remember, remember – supreme over
this tower of silence, like the last of your life
before you slid into easy sleep – drowning,

nothing can drown you, I say, this afternoon,
pulling at the sea, both of us, separate,
  your moving in all places,
as if pushing me further into the taciturn water.