next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
     a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
     her body not even the slightest resistance.
  
after bathing when feet barely dried
      leaves pools, like an admission of something.

i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
     unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
     by the neighboor as you confessed one
     April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
         now aged, wind reentering a distance
     like i imagine your hand in my denim.
     spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.

  carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
      wasting its voice to no audience,
  when we crawled from one room to another
       leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
    and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
      across a tablature is music of creaking wood
      and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
     on the bedpost softly sings

              a punishment: now an urge to go back
     yet not knowing which door to enter,
           every surrounding object as witness,
      memorized a minute's completion,
  refusing to map out which way to go.