Nothing was colder or bluer. Not your eyes
when I left. The first to love were also first
dead:

            sugar & jagged
                              dagger, more

than stripped. During our silent decade,
I read your yellowed letters: inebriated
forests of sentimentia. My life

in our arboretum had been curled.
burning sky & thickened pond, fire

& water (I craved). I needed air-
conditioned metal & histories, stubborn
earth, what it could prove: I’d writhed

beyond us to find how things were slashed
& burned, how indigo insisted

just upon itself, how one could coolly
cut another to slack & blank and crown
himself alone. I stuffed my skull

with art & facts, cranial museum:
Let Me Forget. My heart kept, untended

crop on the wrong continent. Two
always equals three,
meaning not infant but your

leg, my leg, your leg – the human as
big rolling keg story where Zeus cuts us all apart,

making love: what’s whiskey-numbed
between us every chance we get. I hadn’t
learned much when I wandered

back through the trees. I didn’t know
enough about the quick, silver rush

that comes when a knife darts past,
or how soil knows what to give as sun
blasts it to garnet blush, how cane

cuts and is cut to sweet. But it would
never be the same to hold a letter

opener & feel breeze move over me
like your slurred words. Or screw

my fingers into loosed, welcoming dirt & think

your name or crave your hands. That much
had grown different. Breathed blue into my leaves.