You were my absence.

Wherever I breathed, you found me

lying in the word

that spoke its way back

to this place.

Silence

was

in the prowled shambles

and marrow

of a cunning, harlot haste—a hunger

that became

a bed for me,

as though the random

Ezekial-wrath

I discovered, the «Live,» and the

«yes, he said to us,

when we were in our blood,

Live,» had merely been your way

of coming near—

as though somewhere,

visible, an arctic stone, as pale

as semen, had been

dripping, fire-phrase by fire-phrase,

from your lips.