We both read our own dialogue.
Speak it. Don’t understand each other.
Or we do, and just pretend.
Sunflowers are wide open. They smell of pollen
that is not the pollen of our solitude. That one is
in our pillows, when we aren’t there.
Somewhere half way between a sigh
and an epigram, I am in the word.
In its duality, in its poverty,
in its infinity. Spoken into you,
it comes back loudly into me.
Changed. Alien perhaps.
I am waiting to wake you
with a touch of salt
dropped onto the skin, the wounds,
onto the dried up eyelids glowing in the night
like soft light.
Next time we leave, let us touch
the empty rooms, the backyard, the blooming cherry trees.
When someone leaves, someone stays, said Vallejo.
At the curve of the day parting will
become a less painful shift.