I am glad that I can love you again,
take you from the attic and
remove the quivering death things –

we are alive! Not the ghost of
lovely beings loving, but ourselves.

And how we sin together, how we
have the courage to inhale each
wine-sweet cupboard’s wood chips:
upon bread, the wheat can breathe

a fawn shade your skin, the lamp
of which granted the only light
speckled for months in your eyes –

I gave you enough, but not truly a
love to life for. It was a brother

of dust sheaths or a sister of winter
leaves, their final lapse of green
having swam from her mother tree:
I am glad that I can love you again

and that you continue to love me –
independent of the attic packed
with our dark, decomposing things.