Suppose I were to exit, some violent scene of glass bullets
over asphalt in a scattered ring, and me
likely already in black, breathing last through
a God-bitten metal canopy, mind dimming to note
how blood pools in the throat.
Things You Never Knew would include:
Evenings I'd woken up, both hands
dead as if tucked into a backyard sinkhole,
rocking myself out of night terrors--
You, cauterizing your losses,
washing your tires of Carolina.
Where I'd walked to set my ashes to the wind:
uphilll neighborhoods of Nicosia, sun all the time persisting
the ancient way a goat ascends a mountain.
Kind, orange
aprons of ladies baking in Zorba's, covering
honeyed desserts in cheesecloth, watching me pass,
pale, bare-legged.
How I finally approached the lock alone,
holding only your key,
witnessed our bed still stripped.
How very solitary and white it seemed, too still.
The sheet I wore, collecting the floor as I moved,
the sleeping walls, the stairwell, everything
I planned to keep.
How Paul could not hear me, and slept on.
If you heard Oracle sing that day
in my cooling ear, shuffling me off...
I can see you, a night without violet
along it's edges. Silty, I think, too damp.
If asleep, perhaps you'd wake on impact.
If clapping your brother on the back or
calculating out gas mileage to St. Pete's, perhaps
a ventricle would hesitate a moment.
Yes, I can see you.
Eyebrows high and glasses sliding,
your sweet neurotic kinetics all stilled.
As if an astronaut, peering for the first time
over the Earth's starry cliff,
you would know the things I hadn't said.