Did you stagger back to her
or did you float
Did you wheel into that decade
once madly lost
I stepped back from summer
having forgotten
having left behind
the entanglements
Now uneasy again
as if all the complications were
just around the corner
and I wonder
if you would allow me to visit
so that I might
look at you, asking
Whose house
Whose home
Was anything ours
Was night a long paralysis
or was that a succession of days
Did you notice the ditches filling with fog
Or was that just rain
softening to fog
Did a starless alphabet jolt from your gut
as you explained
yourself to yourself
Did you signal to me in dreams
your preparation
or was there no need, since the trance
is vast and turns us
blank without
our even knowing
Turns a person into a few scattered years
A child to a toy
Did I not lead you back
to living again
Or am I wrong again
as you say
Did you not count on me utterly
Have you felt the deadness or is that
just a deadness
in me
now utterly mine
Are these dark blue rains
sinking into yellow leaves
made bright by
passing cars—a cooler fog loaded
in us like bloodflow—
Where are your convictions?
What have you returned to?
I have no measure of you
with whom I spent so many hours
I don’t even know how to tell
one part of the story
I could say: the part of you
that was ghostly
has grown
Or the wind this evening
whistles into the nightweeds
November drops the changes
upon us
The short days overcome us
A darkness laced between houses
We become skeletal
We reach for whatever
feels like light
And how could you ever
get what you want
when you would need to believe
in something other than
the past—friends, mornings, walks,
the spider-branchwork
of cold trees—
But this was daylight
This was hope
We had begun again
The hours of more than three years
captive to a plot that still
makes no sense
as the sky sheeted white
as if burning or lucent
above a street now impassable
and a regret so profound I cannot
speak it—the way we say
This my only life
Or the way we will not forget
what has happened to us.
