This woman, unlike the other poets
is known to me intimately
like she is a hemorrhage of my own blood,
further from a poet than I am
from the wrinkled folds of her legs
(which, in the strange way life works,
happens to be to be quite far;
There are some people
you love with such strength
that in your youth, it is difficult
to know the breadth of their reach,
how fully they will indoctrinate themselves
into the narrative of yourself.
They will shape you like a boot
impressing itself on wet earth.
They can only be lost fully,
amputated with the clean precision of a limb
gone rancid with gangrene.
and like a phantom limb, there will be mornings
where you wake and in the haze
mistake a shape in the dark
for being their long lost form)

But I loved her much the way
I would love a poem,
one that moves me in unseen ways
that makes my bones throb and ache
with the rhythm of life,
that finds the honesty in a gentle snow fall
in the gloaming cold of November,
or the truth in two people passing
down a back alley in May, trees abloom,
who meet eyes, and smile shyly
and for a moment are lifted.
I loved her like this.

I lost her with less grace,
but can we blame ourselves for writhing
after a person we love
the way a body quivers
when it is separated from its head?
When she visited last night,
we met on the streets of a town
battered in ruin and blight,
and I waited on hands and knees
while she circled and searched.
In my dreams, I purported myself
with far greater dignity than in life.
This, I suppose, is why old lovers
pay us occasional visits in the night:
dreams are for poetic redemption