Why I Fear Losing You

1.
How old I've become, with my prejudices
Formed as if from blueprints
Written on the blue of a sky
Intercrossed by unseen winds
From the jet stream shuffling
Sun-eclipsing clouds
To the subtle breeze interposing
A coldness between us

Understood as little as our love
Our two souls even:
Salt over the shoulder
A mass, the body and the blood

An effect of unfurling oak leaves
Bringing a coldness to the spring

A coldness like that of a poem
Written from the muse of unconscious words


2.
How old I’ve become
With my prejudices
Formed like civilizations
Along the rivers of my senses

My eyes are supernovae
They give birth to
Lights for my firmament

Lighting my innards
Depicting curvatures as on a medieval map
With little sense of proportion
With no certain edges

Edges marked “unknown”
But inscribed with mythic figures


If I were to sail upon those unknown seas
Decorated only by the imagination
Would I not find them desolate
With all their waters between us

Bearing upon their waves
(rippling effects of some long-dead wind)
A coldness?


3.
How old I’ve become
Remarking on the shortness of the years

The things that change
Leave in us the detritus
Of things remembered

A weight
Like the weight of unconscious words
The dregs of long silences

4.
Things remembered
That no longer exist
Like things unknown
Wrap coldly around us
With the sinuous heft

Of a snake
Oceanus

Or the fragility
Of a mantle of fallen leaves
Like bed-ridden old men
Finally pressing
Slight frames
Against the earth

Detached by an autumnal coldness



5.
How old I’ve become
With my prejudices
Formed as if from dialectic.


A synthesis of things remembered
And unconscious words
As yet unformed

Interposes a coldness between us
The coldness of uncertain memory

A graveyard
Whose marble inscriptions
Have succumbed to the seasons.


6.
There
We are
Lowered

Delivered
With slow
Histrionics

Like
A charlatan’s
Incantation

Like
Words
Separated

Into caskets
Of extended
Silences