Years Later

This is the place where his body finds himself. Looking out past the crucifix center of the window pane, into the gaze of autumn. This is the place where he finds himself—the swirling foliage of sadness mingles in a dash of loss, the earth opening the way her body opens and closes, the way the stars slip past the overhead anthem of the night, the way her body leaves your body in the morning, the back of the Starbucks receipt littered in a coastline wave of numeric cursive, the fresh lavender scent of her scent leaving your scent, the sound of the coffee pot grunting in the background emitting wisps of steam, and outside the steady breeze of traffic speeding past in frenzied locomotive amble—how he feels that he has somehow lost all of this—the aching dictation of the chest, and how years later he will almost swear that he sees herself reflected in the plexiglass mirror in an airplane as he ogles the Midwestern quilt strewn across the scalp of the planet two miles below, and how he feels her inside the translucent see-through washing machine of his chest, the meadowed yearning below, the plummeting Sanskrit of her name, the sound light make as it splashes into your body, pouring into the carafe of your cells, and pain and lost and joy and thinking how you lost her and how your co-worker was a bitch to you, it’s a kiddie pool but it can save you, the lover needs boundaries, what’s important is not the vehicle but the light, the elongated shadow of her smile, the way she shouts at the pebbled array of overhead constellations and lambastes “fuck it” when you search for a contraceptive. The manner in which her lips seem to float into the nest of her cheekbones, all of this as she drives you around Chicago, around Paris, wondering whose limbs are forever buckled like a life vest around the hemispheres of her waistline, and loss and fear and a frolicking joy and a discovery of newness and an appreciation and a fascination and the ability to lick sweet sentences into the blank pond of the page…