You and I are lonely birds. The last two laborers. 
                         Maybe we don’t always know who we are.
Even our shadows melted together;
            we made up every polished stone 
            in this mosaic.

At first I didn't know how to live
outside of the world we carved out:
                                           that astonishing garden of nowhere,
                                           those deep lakes inside  a mother,
      the train track down your spine, the wet canvas landscapes
                               we used to wander together.
How do I keep from returning
       to the ghostly oleanders in our arboretum?
They are bending back and forth, promising to open
to me.

                      What would it take
          to grow a garden in me?   

There are days I feel that empty canyon
    inside me, pulsing 
                      like a lighthouse
                          and I miss the years
             before my childhood.
When I was still a pinhead egg,
                                          buried in your side
                          and we never were apart.

Then after that. Every morning 
              was chamomile and maple syrup,
                          the color of your hair 
         in the winter sunlight. Your careful voice
like notes from an old record
                              that float across a dusty room.
You never did wash out of my clothes.

Those things that happened,
                 I had meant to move through them by now.
But such a cold river of grief ran over me
that I couldn't remember who I was.
          It was your voice
          that told me: this is who you are
and pointed at my grief.