FOUR POEMS

All you give me is distance, & I want  
to fall into it. Your voice is low timbre,

wry curl: smoke escaping through holes
in my memory. I can’t respond, only

repeat as I trail after you over damp
forest floor, deer slung along your shoulders,

hanging heavy, nearly liquid in its weight.
“Who’s there?” you call out, as I creep

through the trees. I can only answer the same
Who’s there. You think I mock you. So at last 

I rush out & stand before you: my body still
mine, still bright & lovely & warm. And your face 

changes. You look away, scorn. “I would 
rather,” you say, “have the deer.” That voice 

like burnt paper. Long shadows gather 
me up & I drift into the trees. I detach from

myself, fragment. Even when all blood 
& body are gone, my voice remains, 

repeats, relentless & unending. 
Everyone else’s words my only ghost. 

Last night with you. My legs are gone
with my dreams, so I crawl to the window:  

Munich balcony, 2 A.M. The sky is light
-less, but I can still imagine the planets 

circling us like jackals. Predators in an
unending night. Do you remember the stars? 

Their dismal glitter, their dying white fire 
flung across the dark. Like your voice, their 

absence is a relief. I have never been one for
clinging onto something as it dies. I know that

you, too, can feel something shifting these days
in the hollow spaces within your body, making

way for a new script-writer for the end of your 
life; a new director, a new producer, a new cine-

-rarium. One must always have a place to keep
one’s ashes. It sounds like the kind of thing your

grandmother might have said, but not before
herself becoming dark & drifting ashes. 

The mirage of your face warps & blurs
into a scratch, a dot—a point—

—a singularity, too small to see. 

Time eats its tail & then begins again. 

I circle a hole in my memory in the shape of you. You
circle into lightless space—nameless revenant, not quite ghost.
A dream one evening, a nightmare the next: they’re the same. A
hole, a stigmata appears on my palm; when I press it to the door
in the stone it takes the shape of a skull. Upon which God’s eyes pull
my mind back to devotion in their solemnity, their raw and umbral dark. 
Memory is: rattling dusk. Memory is: blind white echo. Memory is trapped
in a sword I cannot lift. Each night more stars tremble and fall from
the sky I cursed the day you left me: remembrance in the 
shape of the encroaching black. I watch the dimming sky and think 
of God, know his days are numbered. Ours never were, because 
you never counted. You never thought you counted. But you do: 
you are everything I had and have lost—the fullness of the world.

perhaps by some oversight—i’m not ready 
to call it malice—you left the shades open 

the morning you left. now the destroying light
marches across the film reel of my memories,

leaks like spilled acid into my brain. all our
words vanish from the speech bubbles that

once held them. our shapes bloom, billow 
into faceless white erasure. two weeks

into my solitude, i discover 
the loss of my voice. 

the past is a nameless country; 
there is no word that can hold the shape of it. 

my shadow is full over me! the sky dark 
but starless. you don’t appear in dreams,

so after night after endless night, i can only 
beg you to appear in my nightmares. finally

you appear as a tortoise, a thousand years old. 
you appear as a tree, growing forever. you appear 

as a kite, stringless, flying away into clear blue 
negative of memory.