Would you think of the fevers you had if the hot subway dipped down
under ashen bridge into sea, your body pressed up to the water-stained window
like a child looking for her home out over stacks of green cartons
of vegetables I'd brought from the market to feed you delirious?
and would you hate if the far light went out—if the bulbs split in crosses
and revealed green flashing jewels hidden, you couldn't pluck as long
as I were there? Or that I would never write in your diary with spilt tobacco
in the patterns of dreaming, or tea-sight, and how it would taste
you would never fear if I spent my best years on you for the tame joy
of becoming better than. You would never fear the conditional if and
but for highways, never be somewhere you could taste a trade wind.
Not suffer another poem or cover song about people hard to love
dead or here or off in bedrooms with armies and money and gray faces.
I thought it could happen, I thought I could aver, I thought we maybe
would hold each other's hair in braids in bed and trade awful smiles
But so fast now the passing is already here. We couldn't follow your pace
and you have gone undersea in the A train over the Rockaways.
I last spoke to you in February about a song we green two could sing.
I loved you the way a falling mahogany would love May.