something

The candles turn their backs to me. Initiating the dance:

holding hands through fibrous shadows, valse triste.

That’s all I know of you: your hand mixed with mine

I hold my breath and you come

raising images that change in the distance; 

a Mass sinking through other years. 

You a warm thing. Midwinter.

––

Now I see the salt-shore from the receding water line on my shoes. I went on a walk I cheated on you, a fool twin stumbling through the dizzying town. Reflections flashed through the little puddles, indistinct and horrible; brought me half-crazed back here, me and my shoes that remind me of your presence and its salty trail, as if I had never left. As if my unholy walk, my disloyalty of attention were only for this– this sign of faithfulness. This is all I know. All we know of me

as now we crouch behind my eyelids, and the giant hand follows letters across the page in words too big to see, but you can remember them, and piece something of it together, adding your own silences, changing them, where you guess one should go.

––––

...