You must not think that what I have 
accomplished through you

could have been accomplished by any other means.

Each of us is to himself
indelible. I had to become that which could not

be, by time, from human memory, erased.

I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable
furious spirit

so inconsolably into you

you would without cease
write to bring me rest.

Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew

nothing I made
myself had enough steel in it to survive.

I tried: I made beautiful
paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage.

The inextricability of love and hate?

If I had merely made you
love me you could not have saved me.

A rose by any other name   could be Miguel   or Tiffany   Could be
David or Vashti   Why not Aya   which means beautiful flower   but
also verse and miracle   and a bird   that flies away quickly   You see
where this is going   That is   you could look at a rose   and call it
You See Where This Is Going   or I Knew This Would Happen   or even
Why Wasn’t I Told   I'm told of a man   who does portraits for money
on the beach   He paints them with one arm   the other he left behind
in a war   and so he tucks a rose into his cuff   always yellow   and people
stare at it   pinned to his shoulder   while he works   Call the rose
Panos   because I think that's his name   or call it   A Chair By The Sea
Point from the window   to the garden   and say   Look   a bed
of Painter’s Hands   And this is a good place   to remember the rose
already has many names   because   language is old and can't agree
with itself   In Albania you say Trëndafil   In Somalia say Kacay
In American poetry   it's the flower you must never name   And now
you see where this is going   out the window   across water
to a rose shaped island   that can't exist but   you’re counting on
to be there   unmapped   unmentioned till now   The green place
you imagine hiding   when the world finds out   you're not
who you've said

This massive apartment: a whole room left
Empty to air, where we used to sleep.
So many steps on the waxed wood, like off turns
On the dial of a lock whose combination one’s lost—
All decaying about me like empire,
The moldings moldering while I sit frozen
As a swan on the surface of a lake changing to ice.
Fruit flies and mosquitoes, a water bug,
Carpet beetles, the mouse found behind the couch
Months after it’d shrunk to a puff of fur:
Nothing to eat here but beer and more dark.
The shower where someone’s young wife died
In an explosion of epilepsy while he slept.
One wonders what he was dreaming then.
The same dreams we once made here, maybe.

The bumper sticker says Live In The Moment! on a Jeep
that cuts me off. I’m working to forget it, to let go
of everything but the wheel in my hands,
as a road connects two cities without forcing them
to touch. When I drive by something, does it sway
toward me or away? Does it slip into the past
or dance nervously in place? The past suffers
from anxiety too. It goes underground, emerging
once in a blue moon to hiss. I hear the grass never
saying a word. I hear it spreading its arms across
each grave & barely catch a name. My dying wish
is scattering now before every planet. I want places to
look forward to. Listen: the earth is a thin voice
in a headset. It’s whispering breathe... breathe...
but who believes in going back?