a long time passed dissolved sediments of our collective memory, fragments of words and image stills settled at the bottom of my heart as I faced down another ring in the cross section of the ash tree outside my window suddenly you appeared before me in your usual way and, having tightened the room around us lassoed in the walls and doors an exquisite finger trap, quicksand in the jungle we don’t remember pain the way it really was; all I have is a black-and-white movie memory with the sound turned off and the concession stand closed every so often the monochrome gives way to fierce bursts of red the cruel noise of broken teeth until it feels as though I’m licking the blade of a knife but every so often the silence also gives way to the pulsing ebb of lyric and I’m floating through clusters of pale green stars shifting lazily at the top of the canopy we were fourteen dandelions with the softness turned out we walked everywhere, winding our hands together you were my weakness and I was your caged bird when things were over I could never look in your eyes if I didn’t see through them they saw through me, clear as glass you were patient but close to breaking I have your voice in my hand now sprawling across miles of distance and four years of silence against walls painted in your blood laid on my blood from a place inside of myself the space in between prayer and too many nights of together-but-really-alone something had been expecting it biding time in the waiting room watching from the corner the entrance is somewhat of a mystery an Egyptian pyramid, stone monoliths flattened circles in the wheat to think I could ever stay away from you and that pull towards a gravity that knows no ground level no surface except for the graceful curl of your sleeping body bent around mine with the constellations drawing themselves precise, like a scalpel making its entrance copying the lines and points onto my nerves multiplying and splitting within cells and a rabbit-shaped cloud drifts by, backlit there we were, two thoughtful figures in the grass outside your house flaring brilliant and colorless burning outlines on the lawn made of crosshairs and a million years of chance uncountable divisions and junctures you were driving miles away from where I was a couple miles away from yourself could have sworn that you saw me washing cars on a hot day, smiling here I am with the canary in my chest a thread pulling through me for your slow smile pleading with me to be simple arrest the complexities in my bones that put the look in your eyes the first time tearing through me like a bullet through water please let there be only one of those and two of us