with a catch at the heart, said: “Yes.”
I went to bed but did not blow out the candle
because I knew he was there, in the dark hold
without any counterpart
but me. So I opened one eye, considering my years and sorrows, to see
what I could, anything realized, bound around with rope to avoid falling,
as in flying from, as if the entire room was beds of feathers
and each breath fell,
thrushes and blackbirds; and then pirates —
downed windless, and
sometimes a snipe ended black with ants in the bottom of a gully
and I ended white
with nothing left to say, but
seized the branch above him, climbed it, moved into the leafiest part
parting my legs as if
to see me was to see her, the one he really loved, as if
seeing was knowing and then
he knew her and so himself
who thought she had been swallowed up by the earth
but no, it hurts the eye to look out so long to vantage a point on the room’s horizon,
to language a hover of starry seeds
that he left, really,
to be planted in every night’s sleep, crop-dusted, weeded and dragged
with a last senseless clutter of words
not for him or for me, but for something far
more pronounced lasting: that
the galloping horse carried off the surname,
her name, her name…