For E.

On days where my body turns brittle, 
flakes off in your hands      thin as bread-shell,
can you still hold it?

                  When the wall
in our new house resembles the one
I stared down while I was drilled

years ago      and I disappear, retreat 
into this lonely grotto of skull, 

even then? Cold night air
pinpricks my joints, and pain
wrests my heart into cruelty,
taken out on you. I’m sorry

when I need to rest on our nightly walks,
always claim the good seat on the couch.

These days, I mirror the scorched landscape 
                        crumbled to dust. 
Once the tourists have pilfered and stolen 
everything they can take
and finally stop roaming, can you

look at Blue Mountain and say: home? 
Curl your finger around my finger 
                 and not let go?

I make you leave early from parties because
my head – an enlarged, drooping piñata 
                  that every conversation
is beating with a raw, barbed stick.

Oh head, how I cancel our plans, dates, anniversaries
still as a Pompeii statue in your lap. 

Everyone wants to live somewhere beautiful,
mild weather and hibiscus bloom. Nobody 
wants this, my landscape      churned
with implacable heat and ravage. 

Most days, I have more in common with this ghost town
than any Hallmark ski lodge. 

No sidewalks will return. No porches 
will sprout from townhomes, not even
a trampoline for the neighborhood kids.

I pressed my face up to the window,
but it dissolved into smoke. I’m asking: 

If you’d loved that life, 
                can you love its ghost?