Bog path. The thud is plaited
with twits of
twigs and
broken baskets,
reeds.
"I need tea,"
he says.
"I need cognitive dissonance,"
I say.
"For what?"
"For everything."
I don't want to tell him --
for missing him. "But
I think everything is going to feel normal."
"Of course it will."
"Yet if everything feels normal, maybe that will disturb me, too."
A popping scoff.
"Shut up?"
"Yes. Just get over it. You are going to be totally fine."
I try to laugh.
And a crack of a snail.
"I'm sorry for that," he says suddenly. "It's my own self I was talking to. It has nothing to do with you."
"Your own self?"
A few more steps.
"Your own self?"
No answer.

Later
over the warm milkiness
between us
I want to tell him that
it's like someone has died

I don't want the world
to look normal
for the brick to be understandable
for the Boston feeling
to be familiar
I don't want the oldness
because I expect
the autumn leaves to be peacock blue
for the clouds to make
jagged holes of
crying lemon
because my quasar has been
suctioned away
and my body has been taken
through a funnel that should not have
happened
a larkspur vortex
hurtled
through an eighteen-hour flight
and therefore
America, too, should be
shaken up:
a kaleidoscope of sickening pinks
and sliding greens
but instead --
there's the neat hedge,
the dust on the street,
the magazine crumpled up in a drain
like always.
And it scuds in the October eddy
and makes so much sense
that I am the one
that is shaking:
my vision is fragile
orange, and a
wobbling brythonic blue.

Now the sparrow spears
her beak through berries.
And that's how it feels,
I want to tell you,
to travel between the two.
That's how it feels to leave
you

and this bog that smells of salt.