(1)
Tired of being, the evening is going.
I seek it in me to pardon the sudden leaving.
Leaves are not as orange-green in words. Dust too, will not dance inspotlights of orange. Even with a crowd of adjectives, faces will not
live as when pools of tinted light animate the cheekbones,
creating rivers along the ink of hair. But the evening is
going, past convincing, and what words offer
in composition is

all there is.


(2)
Why we need each other is because we trace each other’s bodies like maps,
like a geography too familiar that to be lost is impossible, but
if we are, nonetheless, it’s never completely.
If it is the promise of finding that makes me so gritty, so
ridiculously gritty, what I’ve found – in the beginning, and
many times after – must be the kind of curious will with which
a thin-stemmed flower splits a rock.
In the map of you, my possibilities are endless because my ways are not linear.
I prefer circles; I do not like to end and begin things. Rootless, you say,
yet I come back to the centre, always to the centre, and I
cannot, in that case, give you up.

I mean to say that if this tracing-finding-coming back were to end today,
the being-together yesterday would be the centre still. No less, because
even with circles, the centre is mathematical, as what mirrors give in
return when we offer ourselves up. In the end I must retrace, revisit,
return to you because, in my mirror, however precise the composition, I see, a little tremblingly, staircases of abandoned homes.