12 Moving on poems

You saved me, you should remember me. The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. I remember sounds like that from my childhood, laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that. Lugano. Tables under the apple trees. Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags. And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water; perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him. Crucial sounds or gestures like a track laid down before the larger themes and then unused, buried. Islands in the distance. My mother holding out a plate of little cakes— as far as I remember, changed in no detail, the moment vivid, intact, having never been exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age hungry for life, utterly confident— By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green pieced into the dark existing ground. Surely spring has been returned to me, this time not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

1 Our last night in the house was not our last. With two cats in the yard. Our movers took the furniture in the morning.A country where they turned back time.

So, we'll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we'll go no more a roving By the light of the moon.

What am I to you now that you are no longer what you used to be to me? Who are we to each other now that there is no us, now that what we once were is divided into me and you who are not one but two separate and unrelated persons except for that ex- that goes in front of the words that used to mean me, used to mean you, words we rarely used (husband, wife) as when we once posed (so young and helpless) with our hands (yours, mine) clasped on the knife that was sinking into the tall white cake. All that sweetness, the layers of one thing and then another, and then one thing again.

Long after I married you, I found myself in his city and heard him call my name. Each of us amazed, we headed to the café we used to haunt in our days together. We sat by a window across the paneled room from the table that had witnessed hours of our clipped voices and sharp silences. Instead of coffee, my old habit in those days, I ordered hot chocolate, your drink, dark and dense the way you take it, without the swirl of frothy cream I like. He told me of his troubled marriage, his two difficult daughters, their spiteful mother, how she’d tricked him and turned into someone he didn’t really know. I listened and listened, glad all over again to be rid of him, and sipped the thick, brown sweetness slowly as I could, licking my lips, making it last.

The day had finally come when everything there seemed misplaced or out of place as an ex's box of things. The unused beside the irreplaceable, the easy- to-assemble uncomplicated now by disuse. Some hand of randomness leaving behind its lampshades stained like ancient maps, its ladders still climbing upward, and enough old tools to restart a world. Every drawer filled with the other half of things. Everything care embraced, and held once as new, left too ragged for another winter to wear. Its ring of keys dangling by a nail for rooms left long ago. And whatever I said I'd never forget found, just as it seemed completely forgot—all its letters beginning with Dear....

Then he stopped dead on the sidewalk astounded to overhear himself say quite distinctly I quit, in his own words — be glad you weren’t there. Pandemonium in the cerebral combs, unprecedented mass desertions, solar flare-ups. It said itself actually; the lips moved not, no thought was taken. With massive finality and apropos of absolutely nothing it came, a cruel blessing, the ultimate low note of an organ made of ice or a passing night train of black holes. He kept lying there — what else was he supposed to do? — with watch pressed to one ear, emitting a molecular hum. (Ever wonder how they fit a whole hive inside one of them?) Minute hand starting to disappear, such was its speed by now; on his face an expression of guarded rapture. No one could do a thing for him now. They’d stop, gaze down in disgust and concern, a moment before they hurried on or, without looking, adroitly moved around him, the way you would dog shit. Invariably in such cases there is a line that no one crosses. You know what I’m getting at. Mainly everyone just stands around and waits for the arrival of the ambulance; the mind simply stops, nothing, silence. Then the most silver, the tiniest sound of a fracture like that of an ice cube dropped in vodka can be heard around the world; people freeze at whatever they’re doing, and bow their minds, those persistent illusions in pain, or shame. But all is soon forgotten, the sunlight appears all at once like a great shadow and floats with the gas-like hush throughout the twelve spokes, the brilliant yellow darkness of the twelve candlelit hallways forever abandoned, forever emanating out from the one central hexagonal chamber so much larger than all the rest, in which the young queen lies dreaming, amazed, eyes open wide inside her lead-lined matchbox rocking bed, tits up dead, immovable sow, maggot in color.

This is normal now the me without you part the sunday afternoons alone part the answering how are you single part it took a while to fit but it fits

I gave myself permission to stop waiting for some sign that it was okay to move on that sign was always going to be me so i signed it and sent it to myself

starting over at forty-one is different from what i expected i expected fear there's some of that i didn't expect the quiet relief of only having to decide for myself