Convalescence

it’s too late, we’re already born.
this occurs to me while we each
rehearse a careful death.
our bodies snagged on a lure⁠—
from first her lungs, or mine.
I watch the trees from
the window above the deck for
the tell of a breeze,
for the same reason I
stare at the cats’ striped bellies
while they sleep: to know they
still breathe.

I don’t know if she does too unless
I’m with her.
so I’m with her when
she reels in the night, her
heart rushing ahead of mine.
and I’m with her when we
both wish to leave this place, but
remember darkness forever seems like peace until
something cold touches you, and you cry
for the light⁠—
I’m with her when
she reaches a part of her
across sheets for a part of me,
as if we, conjoined, are
dense enough to shape time.

but it’s too late, we’re already born.
the sun streaks across a September sky⁠—
flint and copper⁠—and the
blinds stripe our naked thighs.
the wind chimes voice the leaves
while we, hot-skinned,
without guilt or desire,
feed days to a fire,
and breathe.

Observation

the garage is open
when I pull in
and so too is the door to
the backyard
framing a Rothko
a seashell patio
a sun-strewn acre
a secret forest in shadow
a seeker sky alight

I see you in the foreground
your back to me
praying over seeds
your cherrywood hair
up but falling
down

I feel as certain as the
spade in your hand
yet I am a myth, a man
who might be nowhere else
or speeding away

you do not see me collapse
at your generous gaze

Measure

losing heat, her eyes tearing up at
the frost, we’re momentarily lost until we
find the right street in Harbor East.
she shivers and I collide
with the years I’d been here, before I’d
seen her shape.

that cold spell in 2012⁠—six
degrees, propelled, layered,
stepping out on a dare, with no intention
but to measure the separation between
me and a bar my head her heart
the sidewalk and the sky my hand her thigh
the air and the salt a rooftop and the asphalt
the spacetime I borrowed from me unheard unseen
and a pulsar stranded
in a fraying galaxy
shining echoing on too
high or too low a frequency
the shrinking distance between now and
history (once more, once more)
the numen of an
eternally
cascading
city

the unknown number; the moments
it took to answer my phone.

I never learned who called while I
wobbled home in the dark,
who whispered a name and said, “see the snow.”
it could be me in a few minutes, leaving a message
in the ever tense. offering whatever
helps, what doesn’t harm⁠—
measure again. keep her warm.

Mercy

I remember a monolith, looming slate grey and high over quivering cattail reeds, hostile to hallowed sky⁠—a monument to failure, full in the light of eternity. in a parallel plane I chase the prisonbreak thoughts of my fugitive brain, pleading a spinning sphere to catch the gears of time and avert my involuntary eyes. yet this stone remains, resistant to distance⁠—a parallax insistence. the present slows and refuses to recede, its speed dampened by those penitent reeds, wincing, cowering, before a tolling tower unyielding. like the fallow field that is my memory, bereft of peak or valley to obscure that which will not permit my leave.

but ahead of me, to the east, I remember

the open sea.

Timelight

on our last evening in the house,
after we’d sipped scotch aged as old
as the walls, a storm neared from

the northwest. it dealt only a glancing blow,
illuminating orbs in smoking clouds,
like synapses in my mind casting
found film upon a faded screen.
that week, they released the first pictures
from Webb; exhausted light⁠—blue-shifted,

expedited⁠—received at stellar speed, just then.
we couldn’t see that it was all around us,
that even the youngest ray was still

eight minutes away⁠ ⁠…
like that, present but aglow by the past,
I pictured the emerald swell in timelapse

over a decade and a half:
the thuja trees, nine of them⁠—
we call them the Supremes⁠—en banc,

linking, filling in the seams
like the roots of the Japanese maple
settling under the lemon-shaped green,

unearthing the shattered stone path.
or the rose bushes in the back,
growing a gable-roofed cupola,

where we watched every summer supernova
detonate into sunset and burn to black.
and briefly, we could see timelight,

prismatic, endlessly reflected and scattered,
revealing age as only the transfer of heat.
it felt like it would last, as if we could

catch the dusk in a sunlit glass,
and drink the sky, grapefruit and tangerine⁠ ⁠…
just then, an airplane skirted the downdraft,

and a rainbow framed a lightning flash.
when it thundered, we counted as the seconds passed,
and knew it was receding. so we went inside.