It’s that hour of dusk
when the sky is awash
in waning light, when, if we might

forgive each other, this would be
the hour for it.

I lay down beneath a yellow tree.

I understood I could hold on to the past
or be happy.

Then, nothing. You did not appear to me.

The sky filled with stars
that had been there already.

What we know, we come to know
by its undoing; there is no permanent

exhibit here. Like August stars, we offer
temporary light, our lives measured

in latitudes of loss, the longest distance
between any two points in time.

And, errant, we are covetous: the humble
vase broken by Marcel Proust re-glued,

imbued with preciousness. He believed
that grief develops the mind. What is

the mind if not that surface upon which
the world can be endlessly rebroken?

You hold me in yours as you walk to the sea
and my clothes catch on brier and bramble.

The view familiar, like a page from a book
we once wrote, its single copy, in a library that burned.

         “To exchange signals with Mars—without fantasizing, of course—that is a task worthy of a lyric poet.”

         —Osip Mandelstam

Of course, the secret aim
of losing you those months
had been to find you again.

I went looking for what
had once belonged to you,
found a voice to cauterize

the wound. I made it through
April, May, June; it seemed
I had outsmarted grief

but pulled the hanged man
card repeatedly—the self-same
sorrow said a different way.
You who cannot hear me
without injury, I whisper,
I damage the throat like this,

I, my own entrapment
and hardest to forgive.
Only this life still and all

its boxes filled, its hours
spent fretting over living wills,
the horror of numbers
and headlines on Mars—
more water, more life
where it cannot be touched.