The week dies in spite of our best efforts to blind the calendar.
I try my hardest to linger but I still step back into the car
And it feels like pulling a tooth, heart-string tied to the door. Past the
inviolable barrier
Of plexiglass x-ray bodyscan
where you are surprised to learn you can not follow I sit at the gate,
make lists of the things I don’t want to forget. It’s all hopeless, horrible
cliché, of course—
the light in your hair the weight of your head on my shoulder the softness
of your voice in the shower when you thought I couldn’t hear. Little wonder,
now that so many poems are about the same things, that each of us should
come to revelation in our turn at the C-terminal altar. Days later,
two thousand six hundred and
three-point-eight miles away I can still see
the mark where your touch has given me form, dip below collarbones and
thumb the ring of ritual stones where you cleaved the cold earth.What a gift
to lay bare that which I have always carried and never known. I worry
I’ll run out of time to thank you enough. Next time, I won’t waste
so much won’t take so long to get my act
together. Next time we’ll find each other sooner. The time after that, maybe
we’ll get it right
from the start. I’ll be there to meet you on the tarmac. It’ll be like a movie—
all
million-dollar smile and cheap sunglasses.