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empyrean
    above the playground—look, he is out
    there, casting his narrow shadow
    over the faces in the carriages
    in the park, and I am in here! I do not let
    go of him yet, but hold the string
    and watch my idea of him pull away
    and stay, and pull away, my silver kite.
    Â Â Â Â Red Sea
    And at a party, or in any crowd, years
    after he has left, there will come an almost
    visible image of my ex, appearing
    at the far side of a room, moving
    toward me, making his way between people,
    as the soul used to make its way, through
    clothes, until it lay, bare,
    beside the soul of the beloved, then they seemed
    to swim into each other, and they sang. Before me,
    on either side, facing each other
    like opposing armies, two columns
    of words keen and catcall to each other:
relinquishment,
            
fastening,
abjure,
            
trice up;
forfeiture,
            
colligate,
disclaim,
            
padlock;
free,
            
ligate,
abandon,
            
yoke,
desert,
            
surcingle,
secede,
            
belay;
quit,
            
solder,
yield,
            
snood,
leave,
            
enchain,
release,
            
bind;
 
            
clinch,
 
            
latchet,
 
            
suture,
 
            
peg;
 
            
splice,
 
            
wattle,
 
            
harness,
 
            
nail,
    much work to be done. And Love said, to me,
    What if I, myself, asked you
    to love him less. And I stepped out into
    the trough between the pillars, the dry
    ground through the midst of the sea—the waters
    a wall unto me, on the right hand,
    and on the left.
    Â Â Â Â Running into You
    Seeing you again, after so long,
    seeing you with her, and actually almost
    not wanting you back,
    doesn’t seem to make me feel separate from you. But you seemed
    covered with her, like a child working with glue
    who’s young to be working with glue. “If I could
    choose, a place to die,”
    it would never have been in your arms, old darling,
    we figured I’d see you out, in mine,
    it was never in doubt that you had suffered more than I
    when young. That moved me so much about you,
    the way you were a dumbstruck one
    and yet you seemed to know everything
    I did not know, which was everything
    except the gift of gab—and oh well
    dirty dancing and how to apologize.
    When I went up to you two, at the art opening,
    I felt I had nothing to apologize for,
    I felt like a somewhat buoyant creature
    with feet of I don’t know what, recovered-from sorrow,
    which held me nicely to the gallery floor as to the
    surface of a planet, some lunar orb
    once part of the earth.
    Â Â Â Â I’d Ask Him for It
    Rarely, he would sing to me,
    I don’t know what scale he used, maybe Arab,
    seventeen steps to the octave, or Chinese,
    five. It was microtonal, a-
    harmonic, its staff was of the bass clef,
    but I don’t know how far below baritone
    it went, C below middle C or
    lower, down into those mineral regions—I would
    ask it of him directly, I would be
    lying along him, and would say to him,
    softly, confiding, “Do me some low notes,” and he’d
    open his wide, thin-lipped, tone-deaf
    mouth, and seek down, for a breath
    near the early deposited