Behind the shelf the occupied heart sleeps
in its little jar–you cannot put your hand
on it, so it occurs to you that you
are haunting yourself. Nonetheless, there is
sweetness somewhere, consciousness like some
confection churned from the labor of
what’s left. It’s pain that’s the true little death.
The things you believed were not the things you
believed in, just your basic crenellation
and arrow slits, light shooting in whenever
you are not shooting out. We could not hear
the tree falling, we heard its aftermath,
like some errant tornado backing up
to fill the spaces it left behind or
you there moving at some spooky distance
from yourself and all your darling tendrils.
This big space I had for you, coterminous
alas with the outer wall where the
patrols are napping or whoring or
conspiring with wolves and beavers, who
suffer as we do upon losing a mate.
Wondering the opposite of looking–
how we could set so much of us aside
only to find it waiting in the lapse.