you who could not sit still? They've
changed your sheets, unplugged
the medical devices, (unseemly in a poem
anyway) and sold your house. I didn't
see them lower you into earth,
which taught me how much we learn
from not seeing. The imagination staggers
down a back lane toward its own end,
then dives for a ditch to hide its eyes.
Or it turns down a side road towards
melodrama. Bang, bang.
In another state
I sleep beside a man. On earth a person
knows herself by what her body's next to.
My dreams revolve around the South Pole
of your absence. His rotate on some other axis.
About the usual problems, death, for instance,
we speak the common human language,
silence. Tonight continents of clouds bump
noisily through the sky, and dust from
light years ago settles on the sill.

When your spirit, like a flock of raucous starlings,
flies through our bedroom wall and out again,
I get your joke, how flimsy walls are,
and I go limp, trying not to care. I make a fetish
of not caring. I don't care so much, I almost
stop breathing. And maybe I join you,
though these words are racing into place
so fast I can't tell. Up here I can peer down
at our bodies, making snow angels in our sheets.
And outside in the basket where we laid them,
wild spring onions, white as stars the beautiful dirt
still clings to.