strangely enough
today the arch of your back points west
inside you something is endlessly dripping
causing a certain degree
of discomfort

in all the rooms east of you
you can hear someone humming
a tune your unintelligible family
has been singing for generations
thus I know
that being with you and being in you
would be sinking in history
in a world so unspeakable
all people speak of it
that marrying you is to marry memory
and a landscape
will I live here
perhaps if I write home all over your body
your body will become home
then it would be you in the beginning
you in the middle and you
at the end of things
it would be the sudden warmth of your neck
and your hands which I thought infinite
it would be your smell I’d find
often and in the most
unexpected spaces of my loneliness
[02032014]

Originally published in White Wall Review 40 (2016)