Maybe a pay-phone in France would still reach you; in the South; in the third or second life. Still then as a teenager, bloodless and senseless, skidding another riven diagram into the dust. Now even staggered into fake quietude I can’t believe there is no causeway to the dead. Why should there not be.

I know it is just a zip in circumstance. Tending June’s snow driven to musk and peachlit common rain. I would rather be studding euros into a slot, sighing and missing my tether for living. Grief’s seam is ever false to the bereaver, whenever she returns, to the sleeping or to the psychotic. Her things no longer where she left them.

And her children’s closed forms, like lakes too deep to sound, or too dull. Love for a while was the nearest exit, a problem too wonderful to solve, or bitter to abandon. If I could speak I’d ask what it was you saw in your dark room again, at the foot of the bed, or slumbering beside you? The dim outline of a preset ghost.

You will never tell me, even if I could close the broken skin of heaven with my mouth. My streaming teeth. The stealing light, where everyone emerges then, like water travels down alone.

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