One March night, at the end of winter A Midwestern wind snapping at my brown coat I para-dropped into your city to make Another (the final) attempt to break the siege.

There I took your always cold hands, Squirreled them in my pockets, Quickly leaned over and kissed you.

You later observed, this was without The usual tentativeness that my lips had in renewing introductions with yours.

Then instead to the expected ball, You took me to a quite household That was thirty odd years in making.

As if watching these two people together Would provide us the recipe to their secret skill (Recipe: Two large hearts, infinite patience, never Ever giving up on giving one self gladly, happily) To create a green river of peaceable laughter To invite others as we were invited to drink at.

I borrowed and conjured up this: an old car for me, Sets of mismatched wine glasses and plates in the kitchen, A desk flanked by plants I would help you keep. Books, Shelves of books with our initials and then two, maybe three, kids.

Was it more than these you came to desire, After I left at dawn, leaning into the cold, That you fucked three people the very next week?

The poem you had scribbled on Your hand was washed away.

Yet you hold it to the bulb to transcribe, Somehow, that script of a moment’s sudden grief.

You had written of how you feel frozen Like a statue of limestone dissolving in the rain.

That slow vanishing taking as long as it had taken You to fashion this version of limbs, grin and gesture.

You called this a glass, a windshield of rock, a view That had cracked open like parched ground by repeated droughts.

All the cracks, since then accruing a secondary life; dead memories, Splattered insect bodies and wings, the hennaed pattern on your hand.

You had begun to wipe those lines away as soon as you wrote them, A turbid patina, rough, blistered with flying gravel, grating the bone.

However on the first touch of hand to the penis, you only leave the shape Of your hand in red ink, a Chinese seal that says “empty, hollow despair”.

But you don’t stop there, you don’t give up. You continue to polish With infinite patience, till you draw water from the old wells of wounding.

Till what was a rough ribbed stone, your sandpaper hand, Glitters like marble in the dark, a chip off Taj Mahal.

You turn it to your face, and see a mirror And nothing beyond it but your sweaty brown face.

Remember this well, this sweat is the tax That every stranger has to pay to become

Another exile!