I confess, oh money,
to pausing as if capturing
a winged word: a wake
understood as an angel, one flavored
on earth. It's cozy not being in love.
I look at you and you
and would rather not. So much in the way of civil
happiness, suits on Wall Street, public
representatives of lesser welfare
states to come. It is just that I was thinking of losing you
said Lovethis is over
and what a relief. We're killed by beauty,
an airplane lost in a color the same as the sky's.
I ghost through so many people. They never know it.
Not a phrase about the killer arc of a question
or a superb decision about death:
a voice bubbling over
with its own appeal to another, a crying together
in all kinds of weather: It's like we were never here.
I will leave my own shore holding
its breath
on an unblinkered star-spilt night,
a space that once contained a bed of asphodel
beneath the chalk lines that once defined a suit,
the crime scene giving way to harder
bankruptcies, the patron of saints (who I never was) repeating:
How late I have loved you.
How late I have lived to lose you
So long as I am leaving, I could go on
from station to station, from time
to timealmost naming those obscure objects
mistaken for vacancies that we avoided, like wavy ideas
to which we'd return. Like the winded black tresses
of the aimlessness I marriedmermaid, air-made
as this bank
of invisible ink in ozonewhile I think
Just keep moving, keep writing, just to keep
from giving out.
This poem originally appeared in Quiddity.
