Leaving
I have been telling myself
I must leave soon
And I have been packing
The first, the second, the third
the last – I am not sure which of the
last moments I should pick –
but I have been packing
I have been hiding things
Today my face, yesterday the feet
The things you’d loved in
the first photograph you saw
see the arc of your foot and mine
the curve tells us how close we are to the earth
Then faceless, feetless, I move silently
picking bits and pieces of the nights
we spent tracing maps on bodies
a future on the skies
The shards of the mornings
spent sucking oranges from the bowl
until refreshed
The jagged pieces of the cold anger and hot fury
the first, the second and the other fights
I want to keep that as well to remind
Of the morning after,
as if a dip in a lake
on a burning summer day, brutally beautiful
All this I try to pack in a bag; it is filling fast
tomorrow it will be the fingers turn to leave
slowly, the neck, the tongue, one day
it will be the turn of the navel
I have been telling myself to leave
in bits, in parts, in shadowy whispers
all along these years
and you haven’t noticed
maybe when my smell is lost forever
from those sheets you will see
maybe when my breath becomes air
you will know I was once there.