And when you kissed me--
Were all the kisses of my life stuffed inside our mouths,
And when you held me, between us all the things
I ever held— old vases, broken suitcases,
the photograph from my bottom drawer--
And when you whispered i do love you, all the love (and hate)
Of all the worlds were stationed between us,
Military men in foreign countries, little parades of people
running marathons and protesting abortion rights,
and making love in dimly lit 1920’s lower Manhattan bars--
And when we collapsed under the stars, I saw our star gasp,
and in it all the gasps from the beginning of time--
there was a woman dying in childbirth,
there was a man running out of time,
an hourglass in his pocket,
a sickness spread over his head,
and there was God editing history— again--


And when you took me to that bench across the water
To tell me I was beautiful, i wasn’t sure what was more beautiful
the reflection of your face in the river— or the memory of what this will become—-
and I wished I photographed the water with your face in it--  even more so, the memory--
it is like the thin layer of butter over the toast that thousands of people
pulled out of the oven this morning--
because when I passed your ancestor’s grave,
I saw this etched into another tomb “some people come into our lives
and come and go, and some people leave footprints on our hearts
and we are never ever the same”--


And when we rent a room in my imagination,
in it are all the rooms ever rented by old souls
who carry many souls as time traverses,
and God has the most photographic memory of all--
as every morning he remembers not to kill me,
and the cotton sheet smells of all the cedar woods ever bottled,
of all the wrists smeared with scents and longing--
and in the moment is always folded every other moment,
every grandmother’s handkerchief, and
in this life every other life, and I wonder sometimes
if the future is like the romance of some man
who might’ve stood at the doorstep with a miniature tree
because she did not reckon flowers, or the one who bought
two grave plots, and proposed marriage while laying inside them,
or the one who fiddles with God’s key, like some day he will open the lock,
and all the worlds will merge into a simple cup of coffee,
and someone will take a sip, and even our memories will become part
Of someone’s ashtray.