There is no such thing as I used to love you.
Married is something lovers become in real time.
The way the sugar cube dies and gets reborn
as the coffee, the way a song touches her own face
as her composer hums in real time. Some say love
is in the heart, others, in the liver, but I say marriage
is in every tuned-taut nerve your lover’s name
strums in real time. Time is never more unreal
than in each other’s clockface-tickmarked irises,
two mathematicians forgetting dinner as they tot up
the stars, projecting their astral sums in real time.
Lyric, that lovelorn word, tells everyone who’ll listen
what it lost. Voice, like wisdom, comes in real time.
There is no such thing as divorce. When the knife
slides in, you feel it no more than the sting
a lidocaine needle numbs in real time.
The life left after a marriage is the silence
left after the music: infused, fused, full of what was,
a never with nothing in it that thrums in real time.