The nights that watch us

mark, sightlessly, the motion of our voices

Through the air; the waves that, trembling,

Make their way from mouth to mouth,

As we practice our own terrors,

Work our own fears

Against each other, lovingly,

Feeling the enormity of each rasp,

The tenderness with which each wound is drawn.

Did I, with my own hands, strike the bell,

Some foreign will moving through me,

A stranger to my own desires?

They watch us now, deliver kind appraisals

Of the end; and how well we did,

The very best that two animals could do,

To have sweated out a brief fidelity,

Made some show of self-abandon.

I imagine myself on the shoreline,

Measuring the trails laid by yesterdays’ tides.

Where we had been, on that day, or another,

Is gone, replaced by feeling, an aurora

That turns over on itself, and I can see

All has been condensed and confused

By experiential memory, just a wash,

To be rewritten as we want it.