as
flowers

We were like turquoise threading its way through stone, pushing all our strength into beauty, into places it would never be seen. Our confessions merged like prayers in the dark. We passed fear back and forth between each other's hands until our hearts discandied and grew ripe, and inside the fruit was a seed. I knew then I loved him like I never had anyone else before, which in the manner of myth also signaled dying. I'd become the volcano, spewing everything without really meaning to because I couldn't stop once begun, and there fell as ash a certain comprehension with the fire still in it: I have never been so ugly or in need of connection. Ask me what you will, I said trembling. I'm an open book. He took my hands in his and said, But that's the worst kind. It means there's nothing to protect.

When Jackson asked me why both voices in my poem sound the same I thought about it for months, even after he left. Eventually, I realized I was a child and childish aspirations had entered my writing. I had tried turning a monologue into a dialogue as though I could be soothed by the sound of my own voice split into factions. How foolish I'd been, advancing both the question and the answer. I called, then replied. I begged, then gave generously, all so that I would not have to consider whether something between us had died. Not at a span of hundreds of miles, but shoulder to shoulder, in the evenings when silence pooled in the cell like the chill of autumn, when he touched me passionlessly and never without convincing on my part. That is the solicitude of a clever mind: not knowing if even our best moments were contrived, and if they had been, was all I loved nothing more than a selfish projection? A poet is tasked with creating a sense of the actual, and actually he never took seriously what I wrote to him. Actually, he cried the night before I left, eating my ass for the first time, and I could feel the tears running down my legs. Actually, he pushed me away long before any distance intervened because his mother made him afraid of loss and a woman made him afraid of insufficiency. He had the ethos of a soldier taking orders from fear, turning against the forces of the mind that cried out to be vulnerable. Really, there are too many versions of the story I could tell but all of them can be summed up like this: Whenever I left, he followed. If I fled, he chased, but when he caught up to me and again had me beside him he gave little and asked for nothing as though to avoid leaving an impression. I know you're unhappy, he said. Then strode away growing the distance which binds us together. The poem, like life, was not as I intended. It was an allegory of the mind in the midst of manufacture, proof of my tendency to take control of a narrative. But unlike the poem, endings in life aren't certain, though perhaps nothing ever is until it reaches the end, except of course that no matter what, everything ends, regardless of whether we're resisting or ready.