Hours after disembarking a body might still believe it is 
on the boat: a ferry & its circular windows like a mourning

ring strung on a neck. Or the loop of hair we did not snip 
in your hospital rooms. It felt like a wash cycle when we slept 

on the waves. The boat growing around our glass 
O like a meant-to-say-sorry. A carousel of wooden 

sicknesses buffed to their brights. Though no apology for how 
we carried your cell wreckage & fasteners off as ash 

in the hand, forgot how to allow let alone 
let go on loop. I wished for the heaviest brass 

diving bell my head could carry. To be asked to shore up a cathedral 
from six meters deep. Every morning I discover your head 

on our front lawn being pilfered by birds. Then your hands & feet. 
What do you call the remorse of leaving someone 		

on accident again? To be compulsive enough to tattoo your radiation 
constellation across my chest as if heirloom? 

If I rescue your bed from a sinking 
ICU. Float it to the forest encircled in life 

preservers. Drag it by teeth in a fit. I won’t tell you 
sleeping inside the forest means having your legs

separated from your body as if safe
keeping. The birds in focus in the foreground. Birds as holes

in the wisteria wallpaper. The birds that tear our agency 
off as a tender loophole.