i.
How strange the whims of our intimacies
when a word inflected with unintentional
melancholy can charge our bodies anew,
and apart


ii.
I feel I am a man of hanging on, overburdened
with love, which is mystifying, for the rest
of my species seems practiced and adept
at consecrating the momentary shifts of their
vital organs, and depositing the failed or tired
in neat little canisters, like the ones the
Egyptians used for mummified kidneys,
or livers.


iii.
There are movements we cannot see or verbalize,
but we feel them in our mysterious fibers, those
kicking little neuroses that put our equilibriums
into or out of whack. One night, without a sign,
you miss a phone call. Your return, late, is curt
and you pass it off, something generic but
universal: I feel sick, long day at work.
Nothing visible has changed, and yet at the
microscopic level where those forces
that compel or repel us
fire beyond our intellect,
something has chemically altered


iv.
We are no more than batteries or magnets,
brought into each other’s fields of gravity
until our currents wear out from nothing
more than time


v.
You and I, then, were simply fissile material,
of a decidedly lower grade than most.


vi.
Does memory have any tangible form?
Because my face would swear it does.
Then I stand beneath the night elms,
so thin and unconscionably tall, watching
their casual weaves and sways, and they
sing to me in a key we’ve briefly co-opted.
What do they say?
That my absence is no greater than a
capillary of their three fingered leaves,
spread out its greedy arms, forgetting
its procedural place in functioning

vii.
You, my dear, are lucky because your eyes
still have their new cut luster, and your skin
its new car smell.


viii.
We have a capacity for such disappointments,
load limitations in our rising, beyond which
we plummet, fast or slow. And this is inevitable
because our doors have been jack hammered open,
a hundred little leaks overwhelming our bulkheads.
You have not reached yours, and will not know
when you do, will only realize someday that
your eyes seem more opaque than you
remembered, your voice not quite as full


ix.
So when then can we live in full color?
You are still unfurnished, your walls painted
but unadorned with the treasures of age.
I have a few such collections, but my walls
have been diagnosed with osteoporosis


x.
I was twenty one and it was not quite three.
She sat across a plate of lo mein, half devoured,
and let her hair down, brambles and knots
down over her face, her eyes the color
of not quite ripe watermelon. One
corner table at some dive Chinese joint
in a sleeping city, weightless to the universe,
or at least imperceptible.


xi.
And then later, after the deluge sent
most of these sediments downstream,
you slipped through, in fine, glimmering
pieces, not yet rounded by some ablation


xii.
One November morning, you wake up
feeling rounder, and I wake up thinking
I’m a third of the way into my life
with nothing to show for it. So we shift
again, and already the finer shards of you
have been buried under the inevitable
accumulation of soot and grime.


xiii.
I swam after you a while down the river,
but you were too light and too fast,
and soon I was alone in the torrent.
When I turned and tried to ascend
upstream, I found the current was too strong,
my body too heavy