Who here hasn’t been someone else’s careful prayers on fire? Please don’t write again.

Even I’ve said, “I won’t take I won’t take no for an answer for an answer,” right after I’ve said,
“Don’t ask. Beg.”

Turns out I’ve become the heavy luggage of cameras and spring a friend’s lost in a done decade.
But believe me even in this dark we hear the same bent music.
Do you remember when

we went nowhere alone. I often went without myself but not always. I still feel at home
there, the street where a girl told me she felt like a reason to rush into the night.
Like leaving, nothing there’s ever finished.

But asked to give a compendium on the tenderness of those days, the only there and then
I’d swear to, I’d call it What we talk about when we talk about
“What we talk about when we talk about love.”
(Elsewhere, but at least still glittering we thought.
At least we thought then, Ray. I too do what I can.)
Literature burned. Our eyes fire-dyed green. The stories all sky sized.

I left home and came back home.

I left for the fall for the country and slept next to Liana in flannel on the kerosene-heated porch.
I came home to Newark again and friends arrived gently, poor and impossibly gorgeous at the door.

The story goes the table can’t hold the chandelier’s stars such dust I’m telling you the story goes.

There’s no honest way to arrange the bouquet of lightning
those memories assemble in me this morning.

Just too many crushed thoughts to bury in eternity
I can’t do anything but genuflect in front of them—

What do you think this isn’t, impossible?

I remember how she smelled like a commercial lavender farm. Minor stars. I always wanted
a fistful of that expensive haircut she refused to shake out.

That other one was brave too early in the century. Remember him.

*On the ride out of town she sung about how it’s still yesterday on the moon.
How whatever’s gone’s still out there somewhere.