Times your big fingers smear the tears you've brought me to-
not you, really, the loss of you,
not that even-it's remembering I loved you
and that I don't
makes me waver,
a shade in water stirred-
I need something to touch.
You'd think my hands might remember
ridges of ear-
yet they don't-
warm turns of the shoulder
hipline
arc of the fluid groin.
Abstract.
They softly dissolve.
I can touch nothing.
What did I love?
Hater of gifts, you offered me out of this wreck
nothing to save, so there's no way back
in a copper stone
to the sun abandoned on pebbles
of a red Lake Michigan harbor,
in the pocked hollow bone of a bird
to the whistle of love,
in a ring to a promise of snow.
Cold.
All you ever gave me was your body.
There's nothing to hold.