Your anguish needed a life To inhabit so it chose mine Even if mine was as hollow a shell.

It is this I wear around my head, A crimson bandana, as I bend over paper To write you a letter.

I write, “The tyranny of time Was not fate but the choices we Did and did not make.

When neither passion nor the feebler Pretense of loyalty remained, Prisoners of love made good their escape.

No numbers to account for questions Or words to track pain’s routes. This is the situation, honestly,

Your anguish needed a life larger Than yours, so it chose mine, Till it became all mine.”

[1] Dressed in a caul of half-sleep, He ventures into the lit courtyard Every morning, armed with a long handled broom Composed of bamboo, rushes, and rope, To sweep aside the leaves and twigs Freighted there by a night’s worth Of howling and gnashing of teeth.

He sweeps and sweeps, Day after day, year after year.

[2] The familiar dawdlers, other than the garcons, are all here. Some mouths are mouthing the read words. Some hands are fisting pens, etching paper with ink. All faces are pulling on their shadow-suitcases. And all eyes are filming over like the blind,

Even as you move from table to table Looking for a mirror in which you may recognize your own face.

[3] Clouds slat the horizon. Wind pries loose the last autumn leaves Persisting in their sappy hold. Rain sews up the sunset coal In its steel-grey shawl.

Am I what I am before?

Rain with its wet daub on the window Reminds him of the way memory tends To bleed into time while that old pain Stays stagnant like a mossy puddle.

Reminds him of that high room In which a lamp flickered against A rained out city horizon with its Sharp lines of steel buildings and Soft curves of church copulas, Then a grey wash of a failed painter.

Reminds him of that afternoon With its forgotten winter date, With its tight embrace of sleep, In which it was impossible to foresee This season of watery light that Now seems to stay constant even In the absence of rain’s blur.