next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
her body not even the slightest resistance.
after bathing when feet barely dried
leaves pools, like an admission of something.
i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
by the neighboor as you confessed one
April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
now aged, wind reentering a distance
like i imagine your hand in my denim.
spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.
carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
wasting its voice to no audience,
when we crawled from one room to another
leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
across a tablature is music of creaking wood
and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
on the bedpost softly sings
a punishment: now an urge to go back
yet not knowing which door to enter,
every surrounding object as witness,
memorized a minute's completion,
refusing to map out which way to go.
