Other lives and dimensions and finally a love poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

Echo

He or she let go of my wife and me.
he doctor said it, stressing objectivity.
Blood on denim looks like water at first.
Water interprets wind subjectively.

The child returned their face to the wind.
If I repeat myself I should say something new.
The doctor's smile was a weak cup of tea.
Blood on tile's a form of clarity.

When I say something new I repeat myself.
A child would repeat and erase ourselves.
We had a list of names, column girl, column boy.
We waited for the face to decide itself.

She stood in the door with blood on her jeans.
I was reading a book I won't read again.
My wife thinks her genes let go of the child.
The doctor said no, stressing his certainty.

The nurse almost tiptoed around the room.
Wind takes a broom to water, repeating its name.
My wife and I slept awake in different rooms.
We each let go and have never explained.

It's hard to prove by flesh you give no blame.
Blood unlike water never truly goes away.
Each name carried a different clarity.
We repeat to each other it's impossible to explain.

The doctor hoped we would try again.
When we touch she moves like water under wind.
In her flesh I hear the names repeat themselves.
Blood on her hands will never be new.

It's impossible to stop wanting to repeat ourselves.
We slept in different rooms with our shame.
It's impossible to bury names under wind.

Once a green sky

A deer was on Linwood and I asked the forest
to come and retrieve her, curl its slow hammers
around our houses and decipher brick into scraps
of clay. My hardest wishes are for and against

ourselves, delicate locusts, ravenous flowers
with an appetite for even the breaths
between the spaces. Say you are alone. Pretend
everyone emulates you. Imagine if alone

the idea of the conversion van, the strong touch
of burrito wafting from the bodega, never
germinated in the cavernous brain. Hands
are no more clever than kneading dough,

the weapon of choice is sleep, the gods we adore
eat their own ribs, supplicant postures
of apology break out simultaneously in each
cabin and in exactly the same way. Impossible, ok,

move on. What if instead I owned one tv
and shared it with you on weekends, Lucille Ball
eating chocolate after chocolate as we laugh
in tribal reflex. If there was just one car

we touched the third Sunday of each month,
licked the leather seats, turned the engine
over and ran behind the bushes, terrified
at the growling dog we'd created, could this be

enough? There's a surprise in all flesh, this
is the purpose of eyes, to find and convey shock.
The deer and I faced as mistakes of context,
errors of intention, and she shot into the same

confusion one street over, we are saints
of replication, my house is your house, my
pierced navel your erection, the deer sniffed
for the green mist, thrashed through an archipelago

of false indicators, islands of shrubs that lasted
five paces, ten breaths, until she ran
into the mouth of a Saturn. From skulls I know
the architecture of her bones, lacy nostrils,

the torsion grooves of ligaments, just as kissing
a shoulder I have faith in the cup
and ball that work the joint, making it curl
into pleasure. I can't shrug gravity, the Holy

Spirit Force, but if possible would dream
silks of what contains us, the habit to make,
to adore the crystal chandelier
whose frail music each day is a dirge

for a hundred species. What if the forest
followed the deer, not into death but through
my living room, what if the rain ate my den
and you and I, unrolling a set of blueprints,

realized the sky is aspiration enough? Or if you
and I, reaching for a vowel, for the last
piece of coal on the stack, gave
silence, gave the eventual diamond back.