we were fledgling lightbulbs
an absence is easier to hold than a person. warm limbs tucked into a shoebox in your mind that don’t leave or lose touch, just go on haunting & haunting like a head full of honey. i want to say what we did without making the sidewalks about pathology. how could you know what it would mean for goodbye to be a howling city with an underground train. how growing up there wasn’t a train or a way out of anywhere. & you giggled into my shoulder like so many unburdenings. have i ever told you sitting next to you is like being awake in a sleeping forest? oh my great & wind-scattered loves. when Kentucky swelled our veins we were fledgling lightbulbs. we were oaks dressed in overgrown roots. i’d marry time if it would give me more of you. once lying on the floor his eyes closed he said is this what dead is & we said yes & he said good. what more is there? you can’t put belonging on a shelf.