1/VIVIAN FOREST

They were walking in Vivian Forest, October flurry,

shoulders brushing, naming absolutely everything, from

the copper bells of the beech trees to the mold-blue lichen

scarring jagged rocks. Sharing the world, she thought,

handing him an oak leaf with its tips torn to lace.

But he was memorizing, not giving back, pocketing

the arrow-shaped stones, shifting brain cells to make room

for another slice of Latin, he was keeping it for future use,

for the time when he wouldn’t need her guidance anymore.

She stopped brushing and bumped him good and hard,

a stumble that veered into an argument. She wanted

a relationship with the crowded woods, with him,

with time as it slid a straggle of light through top branches

of the tallest trees. She wanted co-ownership

of the blanched toadstools, the humpy centipedes,

his fingers where they meshed so perfectly with hers.

They each shouted, voices scurrying for the half-harvested

hills, until he finally shook off her hand and stomped his boots

loud enough for deer to tremble miles away. What else

could he do but turn around and head back towards the car,

noticing nothing, not even the low-hanging spider web

whose master builder had one second’s fantasy of a once-

in-a-lifetime meal. She held her ground, and it truly

was her ground, she’d won it, given him up for it.

She stood there as he disappeared, already aware of how

much she’d gained – the rustle of beech leaves like a cheer,

the lichen lying all around her like her own private garden,

the lace of decay turning death into a graceful art.

10/ OVER YOU

In the middle of a twenty-minute tune

played on an eight-string South Korean bass

backed by the meanest set of drums this side

of savagery, he thinks of her – not what she’s doing,

where she is, but the fact that her absence is a gape

like the hole inside a major vowel, that a small part

of him has stopped succumbing to those whispers of regret

and is devouring loudness to the bone. He no longer listens

for melody, cacophony a way of crushing the sacred

broken heart. He leaves her in that dingy club like a half-

stubbed cigarette, a swinging rope of smoke. Outside, the moon

is singing circles around calamity, no suffering in sight.

11/ BLOWN AWAY

He would have blown away had she not clasped him in her arms

that night on the dock at Sebright Bay. He would have floated

across the water on his back like a hollow stone, drifted up the spine

of a green-smudged hill, lofted into a distance he would have fallen

in love with instead. If only, if only driving him mad. All the peace

of mind he could have racked up. All the unbitten fingernails,

the dawdling sleeps, the replaceable red construction-paper hearts.

He would have sailed on if she hadn’t stopped him, her arms

like anchors. But what if she’d never let go, the night fused

to utter surrender? Salt licks beckoning the dark mouths of deer.

A driftwood sculpture of two waves breaking in a star-crossed crash.

12/ DOORS

The one door closes, another opens theory has never been

tested in actual grief rooms, windows draped in black curtains.

Only one door leading to the same narrow hallway

that brought her here in the first place. And of course she’s alone,

sitting down, standing up, opening the closed door,

hoping someone else might suddenly appear – a strange disturbance

in the air, a stray pheromone or psychic simmer. What she needs

is to get down on her knees like Alice and squeeze through

a crack in the baseboard. She should have known life without him

was going to be this small. Would driving her fist through the wall

be a better ending? Fate’s bleeding knuckles, bone’s startled gape.

13/ AROMATIC

His curious cat presses its face into the can opener,

a trace of tuna juice it will lick at all afternoon. Busy too,

nose buried in a pile of her photographs, he wonders if

heartlessness reeks of scraped pots, or bleachy countertops,

or grapes going bad in the crisper. He remembers the first time

he lay in her lap – all he could smell was soap, as if she’d been

carved from a bright white bar that sunk every time it was dropped,

slick yet sticky. How is he to savour her, the energy that produced

her smirks, her seductiveness, her sphinx-like absences? Most often,

she’s a faint tang of mint and coffee beans. Or his own cologne

sweated back on him. Or a breath of truffles from the sugar shop,

as if chocolate had been melted beneath her tongue. Some days,

she’s everywhere – snow and gasoline, ironed collars and cold scarves,

cherry beer and the pages of a poetry magazine. He presses his face

into his empty hands and swears there’s a swampy trace of lust, an ashy

bitterness. Ah, the smell of her ring finger in all its aromatic nakedness.

14/ LANDMARKS

The city pretends to love her with its neon steam and fancy

chins blooming from pink scarves, with its guise of constant

motion and warm red vestibules. She feels close to him

wherever she is, knowing he’s probably been there too. Take

that Asian girl, for example, the one with ballerina calves, who

seems to be losing confidence to the cold wind – he’d give her

a second look, and so she does too. Same with the poetry shelves

at Pages, she reads the spines mimicking his voice.

Blue-smoked bars, yellow taxis, the fluorescence of a bakery –

all gusts of him. Seen through the slick window of an art gallery,

an abstract in greys exactly the shade of everything

he gave/she lost. Stranger by the minute, the streets honk his name,

shrug his shoulders, rush him past. By the time she realizes

obsession is just a cheater’s kind of loneliness, the city

has blown her blocks from where she thought she’d already

ended. Landmarks are open wounds. Frozen mailboxes

taunt her to slip herself thin. Nothing to do but turn around,

hurt the same half-dozen ways she’s used to.

15/ HIM

He is behind the wheel of the car beside her, staring at the red

traffic light as if it were one of life’s big questions, ignoring the fact

she can’t take her eyes off him. He’s also in the car ahead of her,

shunning his rear-view mirror. Sightings accumulate, her life list

growing like a veil of shadows. That’s him at the side of the road,

changing a tire with easy twists of his wrist. Him on the bridge,

crossing from one confidence to another. All those glimpses

she can’t quite reach, all those strangers he becomes. As she enters

the web of inner-city streets, he’s everywhere, sipping something

in a café window, slinging an arm around a pal’s shoulder, squeezing

himself sideways into a phone booth, talking to air. As she turns

into the Bedford parking lot, she spots him leaning against an orange

brick wall, holding a paleness close to his skin, engrossed

in the tiny face of his watch. If he’s thinking about her at all,

it’s her passing, the metal breeze she leaves as she drives

towards the sloping gate. How essential he is to her keeps him

on the move, guarantees his ubiquity. Without her longing,

he’d be sealed in an unseen room, losing track of himself