My brother finds comfort in calculators.
He assigns every number a name.
He believes that they add up to certainty and he is upset with fractions that remain.
So I examine these maps with my eyes, and at best I can trace with my finger
all the way to that town where she went in an attempt to forget the cracks and the lines of my face.

So Jetsabel cleaned out the closets for me and she piled up the boxes in the hall.
Tomorrow when she wakes she'll come take them away and they'll never haunt me again;
but it is still hard to sleep with the moon's heavy beams.
I run barefoot to the backyard, just to freeze in my place by the rod iron gate;
too afraid and ashamed to advance.

Today I walked through the snow and found a field of headstones.
They were in rows like the weeks in calendars where each box is a day you can never escape
without pills or the poison of sleep.
These memories leak from these faucets that weep.
Hot tears splash against the shower floor and I stand in the steam as if inside a dream--
I can see her again by the sink.
From behind the bathroom mirror she pulls a thermometer and places it under my tongue.

She said, "You're as pale as a sheet. You look awful, my sweet. Lay down and wait for the sun."
So I stayed in that bed. She brought me water and read each night from a volume out loud.
She whispered soft poetry. Her favorite was Anabel Lee.
And those words, like these drugs, comforted me.
But the clocks kept waving their hands
and she couldn't understand why temperature would never drop.
And though she promised with tears that she would always be here,
I heard truth like the sounding sea.

I said, "My Arienette, how soon you forget this house will never be your home,
and you will leave in the fall when the trees become graves and their colors lie dead in the grass."
Gold and green torture me like the lies I believe too easily.

Oh my Jetsabel, look at this hell that I have made.
If you want, maybe drop by sometime-- put some flowers on my grave
so that I will look beautiful in my silent sepulchre.
Yeah, that's fine. Throw some dresses away. I don't want anything of hers.
For the moon never shines and the stars never rise without bringing me dreams,
haunted by the ghosts of those bright eyes.