Gigi buttoned up
but loose

narcissus in the vase

Easter again,
with pedigreed agreeables,
plotting escape.

I travel through
twisted sheets

finding my way back to your body
out of a dream
where you died.

to ground the morning back,
I run my hand over your side
up to your hair
you stir, pressing into me.

my hand is like a weight.

I am drinking you:
a gossamer tonic

my fullness returns

there will be a time when
I will wake up and I'm all apart---

and maybe you go before me.

until then

tie me back tie me back

sunday night idles, rattling

it is air
just after a funeral.

guilty from a stolen, wasted hour---
reversing a rebate.

this morning I am feeling
my way through it.

settled, comfortable,
feeding myself.

the sun is rising earlier.

there is a magic history in the birds
I hear for the first time
since winter began

they are the truest thing
I know.

Through uncommon tears,
I said "I love you"
in the basement, under a
de riguer traffic light.

I so wonderfully executed
shedding parts of me
that didn't fit to you---  
but you peeled me,
rind and all.

you said that if
"I were to start reading it,
John is a good place to start"

You said we were not
'evenly yoked,'

and I said
that we are not oxen.

once you've seen many,
alpine lakes are a formula:
ice, snowpack, and gravity.

a few feet deep
with rippled-edged pebbles
beat down by millions of years
of heave, freeze, thaw, flow.  

reflecting the cirque:
a giant cupping it all.

there was ruin
and I was seventeen,
terra firma
crows above.

the last eight years wrought
into a homecoming taking place
inside your Rav 4,
of all places.

all my memories of this
exist inside your vehicles

my dna too.

you want the past back?
we dredge it up---
stickiness and sweat.

you wear the same clothes:
tennis team-issued t-shirt
and basketball shorts,
of all things.

i’ve a gun now,
and it would be the time.
the crowing is louder.

if what i endure is pious,
then I’ll be a Catholic
like you.