for Riley

romance pooling in the gutter, our eyes like locusts

purging the sky. i didn’t mean to get so solemn

so quickly—the gutter & the sky, they’re not

even for us. we’re graceful & inevitable

as an oil spill but reflected in the windows are people

as rich as us with wonder fleeing from somewhere

someone hurt them, escape too beautiful a word

to assign such raw sorrow, the ground moving

beneath them, tragedies they couldn’t ignore

so they fell in love. where does that leave us?

our hands clear as want, tongues tied bright red

from tiger’s blood. the greeks have 8 words

for love—eros, mania, agape—& we only have a hundred

or so miles to go. eros gets all the glitz & glamor, poems

scrapped & salvaged where there’s cash on cards

to be spared or spent. we lost it. we lost everything

& found ourselves in rooms where they took the strings

from our hoodies & track pants, three years apart.

so when our beloveds warn us this is mania, obsessive love,

we’re miles ahead of them. we’re gazelles drawn to water,

rivers to the moon where the angels we wrangled left us

slick as baptism. agape is the love & loyalty i give

to God, years after i found the cleft the light

forgot to fill. you pray to a god painted

on cave walls hundreds of thousands of years

before us with too many limbs until a fire sparked

& suddenly, movement. invocation. you scoff

at an interventionist God, so i hit my knees

for the both of us, map our progress up the catskills

like a black widow crawling up a lion’s mane

but we are not as far north as we suppose we are.

later tonight the sky will go stupid with stars,

keep the same promise of light it’s kept since before

we had limbs. there will be fresh ink on our forearms

tomorrow, summoned ribbons from some singer’s

throat & when everyone busts up laughing or sobbing

that’s how you know a song is done. the kings

in constellations have locked their doors & now

we sit alone. some revelation is at hand.

i don’t know how to build a campfire

but you do & we throw in the scraps of paper

where the lines on our arms lived first before

they found our skin, kindling & lumber, cigarette

cartons & cigarettes. three years ago

i wrote a poem confessing i’d never seen

a falling star. i wasn’t lying. i didn’t write it

for effect. i really hadn’t. & neither have you.

we blow off the astrologists. we laugh rich & raw

as kettle drums. we look up & you guessed it—

a falling star. the only kind i trust stripped bare

as oxen bones. where’s the word for that you ask me

& i can only point to how ash & smoke

static the country sky, trees so tender

their leaves only hit land if they’re still alive.