The way you loved me,
I forgot everything
Everything
I felt ego death, nirvana,
You filled me so good,
When you pulled away, for one shimmerring moment, I thought I was made empty
Like a prairie sky
Nothing but a picture frame around a forever of good clean air

But then the hangover
The morning after you left
I awoke with vines in my mouth
Green bruises under my eyelids
Like spinach in the trash
I wished I could just throw up
But I don't know how to purge what's grown here,
I am just how you describe the salt lake
Like, not good to swim in,
Whatever you had quieted and buried in me
Has been composting for two weeks
Sends out spores and fungal growth now
I am heavy with the fruiting bodies
Of unremembered dreams
I wasn't like this when you shined on me,
But I don't blame your leaving,
This is my breathing, natural,
Every forest does this,
I know the science of rot, of ash,
How organic matter gets recycled and woven back in
The daytime and cleanness of your love
I can dance there, for a time, for sure,
But some nights I shiver in the uglier corners of the cycle of rebirth,
It's part of me

It's the lehigh.
I didn't know right away
I'm sorry
But I got water up my nose and down my throat
The lehigh entered me
It bled right through
That river said to me
don't make this about your new person
I been waiting for twenty four years
To pull you under and see what that body became
I made you outta muck and sediment and broken glass
I made you outta my curse
I made you outta runoff
Don't run off
Don't stand on that high ledge above the water singin empty promises
You started a ritual and now you gotta finish
You're gonna give me those shakey legs
And we're gonna drink from each other.
She wraps her fingernails around my throat as she says this, she says,
Blind seer, little messenger, poet,
You self identified as storyteller and now
You're gonna listen to my story with your blood

Goddamn it, I don't know what this is
darlin, I wish I could just flower all year like you do.
Keep it simple.
But I know there's something in here
I gotta find, I gotta learn, I gotta mend,
It sucks.
You kept asking why people have to go to work,
I ask that too as my cracking bones lay me down on this old bed, head fulla heat lightning, belly fulla swamp, sweatin out the sick humidity
Why do I have to go to work.
What is it that's so important
That this wrung out body has to be set ablaze all over again
What is it trying to find