Two trains parallel move in opposite directions. Between the cars,
the horizon strobes. Field,
farm, forest, barn, mare, bull.
 
God shuffles the deck. This is not
a lament. 

There is a hand on the floor
and there is vertigo. You are gone and so is my leaving. Who will guard the ruin? The rupture? The 
wreck? The poem I left: 

on the leaf-curtained balcony
and in that August peach
we find each other in the same tense 
love’s grammar 
puts itself in order

Arendt was wrong about lovers: 
we belong to the world. 

Our love belonged to time. 
See, how tense strikes? 

My belief is a cowboy with a gun.
Or is it just the gun? Who holds
it? Points it? Takes it? The shot. The cowboy, 
he fires, out comes a wound,
already parsed and punctuated.
It is punctum, puncture,
but there is no hole,
no opening through which to crawl. 
I am without narrative. I am bereaved. 
The referents are indistinct.
If there is a body
to whom does it belong? 

That endless tug:
the rope, the net, the knot, the thread. 

It was not a lament. Was it a false start, 
a cadaveric spasm? You were a man, 
not a monster, then you were a boy, 
not a monster, then you were crying 
and our river was calling us, orphaned, 
soundless, and there was the labyrinth, 
the light, the monolith before. 

Here: have another image. Then another. I’m sorry. 

Myrrah’s lamp, but the bulb is blanketed by many moths. 
How could I have stolen it for you
the last of it, the sky’s purple,
Prometheus’s flame, his liver, the bird, 
the blame, the ember: where can I put it?