Meet me in the mint field under a black umbrella.
Half your memories wait there in the shallow burial
of a cigar box labeled My Once and Future Homecoming.
The prairie and its empire of grasses aged from green
to champagne, and my pupils are useless in this biblical light.
A stray wandered through the backdoor I left open.
I gave it your middle name, picked it up by its neck.
Ticks studded its ribs like proofless rubies. I do that
a lot now, leave doors open. See how little I’ve changed?
I still cover the eastern windows with masking tape X’s
in every storm. Once I was in love with leaving, with wearing
a dress with forty-two white buttons down the back.
Now I know the German name for the counterfeit darkness
you see when you close your eyes translates to own light.
When I press my eyelids looking for it, red spreads
its knowing stain the way the oil in our fingertips once
darkened pages of hand-me-down erotica as we sucked
each other’s toes. The months after you left, fantasy
was a form of injury. I catalogued each What if in cursive
to try and wish my way across the thin distance between faith
and waiting. Truth is, I put up with your bad waltzing
because it made you close enough to kiss, to push the pin
in your boutonnière into your breastbone. I think I might
be in love again, this time with the finch pilfering purple
coneflower seeds in my garden. You loved, once, the prayer
in me where a prayer shouldn’t be, the crisis with a theme.
The way I kneaded breath into the shape of you.
How your absence reefs my skin. How your breath once did.
How you tailored your sentences to almost but not quite reach
the floor. The parts of me that ache for you lately are incus,
malleus, stapes. And when I whisper Come back to the scentless
side of the bed you almost do, or your voice does—my heart
in its bone kennel, shaking, convinced it can hear you from
that far, from here, from this home I cannot live in or leave.
“The river’s injury is its shape.” —Wendell Berry
