On the map, my fingers of their own volition trace where you were when you left me and went on your own road. Perhaps they remember you more than I do.

It surprises me that this memory of touch is greater than that of memory of knowing. A friend told me the other night when I was down and blue, that I appear to be riddled with bullet holes, through which sunlight pours into my emptiness. Perhaps to light within me maps of places where we were once, you and I when we were still: We.

Spaces have just remained the same, it perhaps still is 700 miles as the crow flies from me to you. But inside all the hollow spaces that I now live in, it's another infinity, even another time.

And of that Stone Age are these heliographics My fingers obsessively trace on various clear maps, As if they see something I don't.

And when I try to remember you, in fragmented images That flutter like feathers or migratory seeds on barbed wire fences. I sense in my open palms, try to touch those dances which our bodies knew how to without our minds deciding.

And sometimes in flashes of rolling thunder I see how my fingers held your waist as they danced with you, in that far away country, maked on the map of my soul; Which sometimes these fingers trace over again so surely for they surely know.

On maps, on the walls.

2001:12:02 11:30 Atlanta

I wrote this when my fingers wandered to that lake shore city on a picture of the earth at night that was taken from space as the sun was setting over the Rockies.

This morning eating my sand- witch, I wondered which is which: me madness me, When I saw jets playing

tic- tac- toe On the winter sky board. And said "Wooohooooooo lovely game."

2001:12:02 01:20 Atlanta

Riding the prairie roads, one autumn afternoon with you, I felt invincible, the car Was a panzer rolling along the asphalt, the orphaned sun was shining right along the embankment, and I pointed my finger at the blue sky at the edge thrilled I said,” Let’s my dear, Let’s keep driving."

Halloween pumpkins were grimacing at us through the windows, perhaps you didn't notice them as you were busy humming a song to yourself and driving, perhaps they knew something about evanesce that neither of us knew then, old town streets were inlaid with reds, yellows and browns of the maple leaves, and driving along we lost our realities, In that maze of twirling color.

The old two lane passed through small town America and I was dreaming of a life that was as clear and sharp as the sun on the grass and on the wings of blackbirds whirling in the distance, perhaps I dreamt too much for that beautiful fall morning to bear. Perhaps I heckled the breeze too much with my enthusiastic shouts of joy, as I sometimes gazed at the quaint towns we were passing through and sometimes at you. "Oh god", I thought to myself, "she is beautiful."

And we finally stopped by the river as the sun was setting, we had the wharf for ourselves, and I pointed out the contrails of the jets, beyond the edge of the dark, and as you looked up I saw that they were golden in your dark eyes too. Perhaps my indecision, of whether I should look at the sky or the sky in you, was too much for the seconds we spent there, holding hands framed by a naked tree casting it's shadow on our one, as the cold began to move in from the river with the blackness of the night.

It's fall again and the trees are as bare as I am, the cold, tonight moves in from the windows that frame a dark sky, in which I sit and trace highways. I obliterate the stars with the hail of my tears and I shame the quarter moon, with the incandescence of my grief, as I ride the roads again, to go beyond pain that comes without you, without you.

2001:11:27 22:30 Atlanta

It's strange to write about grief without actually crying.These words were coming from the skin of memory again.