I’m sorry. It was a minor matter.
All the ways that I was here and the ways
I wasn’t. A sticky black key in your
polyphonic arrangement. The silence
above the soprano. Ambivalent stopwatch.
The silt that accretes under the fingernails,
at once aging and new. What was I to you?
My rural blood has slowed, a great distance from
the city spinning its turgid centrifuge
collapsing into an ever smaller mass.
When my sad pendulum comes swinging back,
don’t go sending anyone to find me.
Don’t tell me what else they claim to discover.
What use is water when it is so cold,
so cold, my love, that death gets dressed and flees
in the face of something more permanent.