I’m trying to become habitual, amidst all
of this. Though two years back, spring
passed over the whole of New England
like a broken promise. I owe it to myself
by now, good creature that I am. Like the cat,
I want only to hum in the window’s loneliness
of light. Stare into that blankness & unconsider
the plot implied by outside. We call her summer
sausage & feed her meat scraps like the good
little hunter she is. There’s death
& there’s the sport & Glory of it. Behind another
window, a different springtime is live
streamed before me, pixellillied – pastoral of
your unwatchable funeral – yours, as in, For
me – though yesterday, there was a just
yesterday: steam of midday qahwa rising, rotund
with your laughter, every silence
gutted open by the grin of you; the border between
said & unsayable: a quiet
or disappeared decade – Filasteen
or negative image of – marriage or negative
image of – Khalo barely remembers you
& Teita’s love story, at the apex of Country(ocean)Not
Country, of mine(border)mined – the notions
of you converged into a single blessing: Sido –
when you left, did the space between our histories leave
with you? Every notion of country – every inaccessible
conversation of? I’m trying out past tense on you
but it wells on my tongue like a confession: the last
time I saw you, I left you early to kiss a boy
I thought I was in love with, though all of me
understood you’d go to your grave
unknowing. There’s distance & there’s
Distance, Earth
& the collapse of it. Though softer
than I can imagine, Khalo speaks your name
in the names of discipline, of immigrant & both
words beyond my self, both unfilter
& uncommit – Auntie says she split your skull
open once & after, all you could do
was hold her, weeping & trembling. I could never
stay like that. I already left you
to see a lover I’d end
up leaving for an open window, or any other
implication of loneliness; though it was you,
in quarantine, halted mid-bud – the timeline,
at once, an arrow &
its quiver. The held & been
holding; every was knotted into
becoming – something about the interruption
of a body, leaves me
unforgivable & how can that image me anything
but negative? Uncommit. Say past & mean be
yond – I am therefore
I I before. The self that wrote this
is already a notion of former. There’s a grief in me
though even that is – pardon, has been – sequestered
beyond reach. Beyond inevitable, & outing
of. I promise, I won’t promise. I don’t heir,
I err. I reach, I reach & only
air – this ecological almost, right
there: just beyond my window, an inaccessible spring.