In August, you were real and unreal. 

Lying on the floor in sticky heat,

I wrote lines to you in my head,

Crossed them out.

 

As summer slipped I sensed the shape of you in fever dreams.

I told my friends it’s like living with a ghost. 

 

Counting the days until October,

When your edges came into focus. 

 

Thinking of you is holding a good thing in my hands 

I wish I could fold myself up and put myself in yours

You could put me next to my letters and read me at your pleasure.

 

I want to pin the different shades of feeling,

And map them with criss-crossed red threads. 

 

This is an attempt. 

 

**

 

The day before we said goodbye, I re-read White Nights 

And thought about the midnight glow of the Charles Bridge, 

About dreams and miracles and selfless love,

About closing the book.

 

You asked me many questions, but not enough.

Now I take refuge in the clean untouched corridors of my mind—

Take my solitary way.

 

I ask myself:

Did you want me as a stepping stone, a data point?

Did I want you as a teacher, muse, savior?

How productive is it, to locate the place where feeling starts?

 

No answer holds all the facts—

The feeling spills over.

 

I am hopelessly delusional and relentlessly analytical:

I put poems in spreadsheets; I mean my metaphors literally.

I sort my life in quarterly cycles of enchantment and disenchantment.

 

I ask myself:

Had I not asked you what, exactly, you thought love was, would we be in it?

 

When I think about you I poke at the joints between words.

I want to flood your mind with light: perfect knowledge of you.

I should have asked you:

Do you conceive of yourself as a fixed entity? 

What does your family do for Christmas? 

Do you usually dream at night? 

 

**

 

Before I met you, my mind was a cacophony:

Curtains singeing, billowing out black smoke 

Thinking, constantly, that I wanted my mind back, like it was before.

 

… their eyes how opened, and their minds

How darkened; innocence, that as a veil

Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone… 

 

Last spring, reading Paradise Lost,

I thought about experience and knowledge,

And wondered if this was my new mind-shape,

If the suffocating would be perpetual.

 

Now I think the dust has settled.  

 

**

 

On the flight home the sun sinks, glows red — spectacular 

And the Adirondacks stretch out to me in soft embrace

And the shimmering cityscape over the Jersey turnpike —

Inexhaustible variety of life, thrumming. Initials sealed in concrete. 

Tied to it all still: an umbilical cord. 

 

Your country saps color from the sky,

From my cheeks on the long walk back. 

Flush from the warmth of your bed, fading —

I press my hands to my face. 

 

I never told you why I was so ready to leave Prague: 

I started to get a clawing feeling in my throat, tightness.

This has happened to me, whenever I stay in a place too long, 

Ever since I left New York.

 

Maybe there are infinite shades of missing:
Missing people, places,

Versions of yourself.

 

I ask myself:

Will I ever be unhaunted?

 

On the plane I hold a slim red volume of Anne Carson.

When her lover left her, 

Her heart snapped in half and floated apart.

 

I realize I feel unsplit —

But one day unbelief started:

 

She used to know she had two hands 

But one day she awakened on a plane of people whose hands occasionally disappear.

 

I awakened and I can’t hold on to anything — shapes slip.

 

What she pins: Love is an epistemological crisis. 

Experience re-scaffolds hearts and minds

 

And disappears hands. 

 

**

 

At home it is bright blue and crisp, cool wind and crunchy leaves 

I wake up to swallows swooping, swerving.

Your shirt still smells like you. 

 

In the kitchen my father makes me coffee

My mother strokes my hair

My sister wants to go apple picking.

 

I wrap a red scarf around my neck,

Pull boots on. 

 

Looking out the window on the drive,

I hope your here and now is good

And your sky is clear.