One clarification—the horse mid-jump,
saddle emptied, focal point of a blue-tinted,
mesa-filled horizon, deserted when a southbound train
forced us to opposite sides of the track,

was my idea of arrivederci. Now you peck away at single keys,
not bothering with home row, in search of L’estasi dell’oro.
The inbox clangor—the important data
forwarded: Questo è il mio Inferno.

You’ve done well to capture the way we letterboxed
each other’s eyes. You ask if I still watch too many
of these things. Yeah. I trust Ennio’s big brass
and swelling strings

find you asleep, not quite Claudia Cardinale,
softer probably, as you sweat out Fluoxetine
next to your skinhead boyfriend
(I didn’t know about him).

Still, I worry I might see you inching toward me,
a hazy shade, extraterrestrial in desert heat, a female
Henry Fonda come to inflict one of cinema’s
greatest crane shots. I say, “Not that. Not the harmonica. Not…”

ringing in the grease-stained garage,

because the ritual of his lips make a slow slur
of her name, every day after school

for all of fifth grade Tara and I make our legs
into wind and bike past porches

and over the creek bridge, and when we meet
the boys at the cemetery behind the schoolyard,

and gather among the gravestones, it is still
a game. And when one of them closes his eyes

and counts, Tara teaches me to kneel tight
enough to fit a tabernacle, to fold my limbs

to fit the shadow of stone; to make myself
soundless, to wait in stillness to feel

a boy’s hand, and I wait there like that
and wait there like that, and I wait until

I can’t anymore, until the fear of being
forgotten grows larger than any other fear—

and then I know without her to show me:
all I have to do is breathe, and I’ll be found.

This poem has no occasion.
I edited that out a long time ago.
It, like a body, or like a memory,
has rebuilt itself over time:

each of its component parts
has been exchanged for newer,
more efficient ones, so that now,
when I overhear someone

saying the word “coffee,”
you are drinking a cup of coffee.
Input the output, ad infinitum:
I have become so efficient,

I have even learned
to grieve formulaically,
while the function of your absence
has grown less and less

integral to my algorithm: you
aren’t even you anymore.

A Hank Williams hangover is early, I guess,
the cold can of morning, a foot dried of sweat out
the back of a truck, a motel parking lot. A diner in
some city made of trees, three days spent there with
empty bottles for hands, a new record. The motel
yet breathes with tape over its mouth. Hank
Williams’s hangover is what I can’t heart: I mean
hear, what I can’t hear: his rattle of coughing in the
worms of light, his knuckles, locked up like the
gold in tambourine. This world is weightless—an
hour of church bells, no church.