One of these days I will be standing on your porch,
Facing a you with one of these babies in hand.
On that day, it will be my nape you see last
As by then you will have learned
Not to look into my eyes.

The memory you will salvage as you close the door of our tryst won’t be
         that time we bought the tube at a gas station with some Dr. Pepper,
Nor the forever we disproved in the name of circumstance,
                    Nor the never-ending ending,
               the looking like the bad guy, and the
          what-always-happens.

No -
what you’ll remember most with that tube of what-used-to-be chapstick
          Is the feeling of pretty pink petrolatum over the seams of your lips,
               The every time you didn’t pop the slippery white cap off,
                    The 23 flavors of us and then one,
               And the trembling, the ever so slightly and off-key apologetic,
          At the lingering taste of a something you yourself didn’t finish.

I.
There lies the vast longing to be engulfed in suspension,
to lose one’s orientation in search of the true unknown
for salt waves that lick the skin clean and blunt
the sleek lines of the face.
It takes a while to ebb a whiteness into the hardness of time.
II.
It is said that in flames,
the body forgets it is vertical on a stake
and the head is anywhere but above the shoulders;
that in cleansing with fire the skin turns red
then, in an instant, chars to black.
III.
They say there are two ways to cleanse oneself:
while white is the color of salt-dried purity,
black is the color of fiery clean.
In the end, after the fire brittles our bones,
all we throw into the sea is gray dust.

It’s the hollow sound of a toast to fill the silence of unaddressed questions,
the celebratory clanging of glass on glass
ringing from assumptions based on past experiences and theories
     from synapses of protagonists or all
that is mystical; a god or a God
          for the rhetoric of bad days; the precatory shoulda, woulda, coulda’s
   you can count with all digits and the humdrums,
the lalala’s to songs with lines you can never remember.

It is to fill in, with pencil, the
blanks of unclear intentions, capricious endings,
     the what comes after the highest number, tentative now, for it is a trick question,
the true stories of Bermuda Triangles and Altantises,
          for the ones Amelia kissed goodbye and all that is brief,
               promises neither broken nor kept;
     some, hypotheses for what happens after waiting.

               It is the makeshift certainty ascertained the day he left
          all these unfinished, unanswered, incomplete… things. The sure of it
     invented by staking everything in a nebulous something,
a nebulous anything that will have to do, like cotton patches
     on satin dresses or saints for hopeless causes.
               It was the invention to quench the constant
          need to know, to fill the in-between start to end
       for all that we can not stop. A made-up map by pirates below ten
for every time we must set destinations beyond unchartered unknowns;
                     a make-believe place holder to hold us to the relief
          we get from closure when
                  the universe gives us none.

It is the lemniscate, the amen,
the St. Jude we assign to our altars
until we find actual satin or the aviatrix herself,
          or surrender everything in the spirit of faith
                    or believe
          that not all things unfound are lost.