Errata

Lover who lives

in the vellum of your skin,

in the soft tissues of your belly –

I am apologizing now

for different things than I did then.

I am forgiving you

for asking me to relieve you

of the weight of our failure.

I am uninhabiting my own bare feet

on the wood floor of that

crooked house on the hill.

I am no longer speaking to the jumble:

shadowy peacock woman,

floating red bikini,

recollection of a brassy voice
and of mischief laughing in your irises.

I am telling you now,
I should have known that there are losses
more painful than death.

August in Northern California

always means wildfires

and you and I went out in

four glorious days of burning.

I should have known because that last night

you watched me intently and wondered,
as if to the relics of smoke in the air,

who will you be when you come back?

I should have known then that people sometimes

vanish in their own survival.
That people are sometimes
unrecognizable in their own renewal,
and that I had never seen your rootedness.

I am sorry I did not understand that

imputation was to blame

when you insisted,
I am less now than I was before.

I am sorry for believing

that the afternoon we spent helping those men

push my car onto a log to unstick it from the curb 
and laughing in the wine shop afterward

was proof that the before-you was coming back,

that it was only a matter of waiting for her to re-surface.

I am not apologizing now, as I did then,

for refusing to make small-talk in the kitchen,

for the withdrawal that matched yours,

for the whole slow death of us.
In these silences that follow silences,
I am apologizing now for refusing to grieve
your and my losses
of that woman.

Headlight

Dinner at a greasy Thai restaurant

in San Luis Obispo, where the

streets seem too blissful

and escape is in a Shell station

just outside downtown

It is not a long drive down on the 101

cars sliding through darkness,

crossing the grapevine before ripening,

flitting across lanes to the 134,

the bone marrow quiet of driving alone at night

Stoplight at that empty intersection and realizing

the last time I felt my body

it was unfurling in a rest stop parking lot.

Corner coffee shop where the masochist predicted
my lust would turn to pain - 

Dampness on the stairs outside the house,

a rain I had just missed made me think I started losing limbs

a long, long time before the In N Out in Camarillo.

She ran into the living room

to embrace me, stood staring for a moment

at her feet in shock,

my fingers were still lingering in that

Highway 101 darkness and under her

tree lights I was still palpitating, scentless like last summer.