In tall pines and
night storms
when we were
close
to over

& hiking with
my long hair
down
in frantic search
of clovers

in our dancing,
& tambourines,
your whiskey drinking
sober -

You live as a
memory
     in
perpetual
October.

Famous love stories from
Paris
& poetry you
don't understand -

pages of maps from wars of the
past and
blueprints, models,
    attack plans

paintings in places
we might have been once -
and ghost towns that
I'd like to go
  the history of places buried so
deep in bomb shelters and
  trenches of
snow

From front to back
from your to my
hand,
chapters and chapters of
copy

The way that we speak is as silent
as wings:
we communicate in books
  and
  coffee

Bookstores &
confetti have a
peculiar thing
in common,

confetti is the
final form of
  trees.

When the women held their
signs with marker smeared like
lipstick on the neck of the man who
didn't let me go -

I saw colored shapes against a
wet, grey sky
and a thousand women full of
    togetherness & gold.

And this I know:
when I am out
  and I can see the end -

I'll never approach the cliff
and give myself
              the other side

and that
   from far away
I can pretend
it's all
a free fall
into
nothing