'What have you known of loss That makes you different from other men?'

• Gilgamesh.

When the desert refused my history, Refused to acknowledge that I had lived there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons. There, among the red rocks, you lived alone. I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry. Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics of our former life, proof that we'd at last found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured, repeatedly, "going where no one has been and no one will be... Will you come with me?" You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled out for loss in your arms, won't ever again be exiled, never again, from your arms.