the living room chairs are covered now
with new flowered cloth
you never saw

on the bed where we lay
close enough to dream each other's dreams
are sheets you never slept on

I dream of you
as the landscape shifts
an atom at a time
around this body that still feels your touch
on this skin I continue to wear

you fling back the covers
loosening the tucked-in edges
throw yourself down
on your side of the bed
with a hurricane breeze to freeze me
as I lie in the warm
hospital-cornered envelope
on my side

from my burrow of quilts and pillows
my hand reaches out bravely into the chill air
to stroke your cheek
you turn unexpectedly
I poke you in the eye

you rake my back
with toenails in need of trim
I lean to kiss you
as you sneeze
my nose cracks against
your head

we are a comedy
of bad timing
the bed a burial ground of good intentions
crossed signals missed opportunities

my cold feet seek out
your warm legs
your elbow bruises my hip
I speak you snore
I close my eyes
you reach for the remote
turn up the volume

I smile seductively
just when you want to read
the phone rings you talk
and stretch the cord across my neck

we turn to each other
and away in perfect
mismatch
I try for eye
to eye
approach and find
your back again

I love you forever
my father's letter tells her
for forty-nine pages,
from the troopship crossing the Atlantic
before they'd ever heard of Anzio.

He misses her, the letter says,
counting out days of boredom, seasickness,
and changing weather,
poker games played for matches
when cash and cigarettes ran out,
a Red Cross package--soap,
cards, a mystery book he traded away
for The Rubiyyat a bunkmate didn't want.
He stood night watch and thought
of her. Don't forget the payment
for insurance, he says.

My mother waits at home with me,
waits for the letter he writes day by day
moving farther across the ravenous ocean.
She will get it in three months and
her fingers will smooth the Army stationery
to suede.

He will come home, stand
beside her in the photograph, leaning
on crutches, holding
me against the rough wool
of his jacket. He will sit
alone and listen to Aida.
and they will pick up their
interrupted lives. Years later,
she will show her grandchildren
a yellow envelope with
forty-nine wilted pages telling her

of shimmering sequins on the water,
the moonlight catching sudden phosphorescence,
the churned wake that stretched a silver trail.

the flowered field is plush
and comfortable as slippers
so we almost cannot see
hollow bones of fossil conversations
fill furrows that we flew across
before the land was mined.

Ghosts of words
cling to low scrub branches
and whisper with the wind
as we sit unruffled
in our fireside chairs
and read our books
and never think of when
the dry stiff grass
that bites our feet like tiny teeth
was soft and green.

And so I move
another year away.
I have a new haircut now,
but you would recognize me still:
I look exactly
as if I were the same.

You will not grow old
or stooped or slowed.
Caught in crystal time
you wait
while I wear out,
while my body
imperceptibly accumulates
the weight of passing days
that we will spend apart.

I will be older than you
will ever be.
I will pass your age
become so old
that I am new,
and change a minute at a time
until nothing is left
of who you knew,

until the space between us lengthens
so that one day if you saw me
(if such a thing were possible)
you would mistake me
for a smiling distant relative,
an elderly aunt from crumbling photo albums.
You might sense a vague remembrance
and wonder if we'd ever met.

like untracked snow
the pages wait
the days aligned
in black and white
boxed like small gifts

the leisurely rounds of
full moons and crescents
turns of
equinox and solstice
weave through
the weft of months and seasons

we are past dancing
at the turning of the earth
past burning junipers
into holy incense
past bearing shaking sacrifices
to the altar
our eyes lifted toward the moon

still the primal rite
owns my heart
bereft of wand or chalice
for the risky passage
bare under the guardian stars
I clutch my private totems

I pause on the brink
the sacred pages whispering
through my fingers
like the breath
before the curtain rises