JEFF

On my way home I met a tattooist on the train. Her face

looks like yours from an awkward angle, Jeff. In her

chequered eyes a swan was waiting to fly

It's been years since you vanished. On my arm

where you first placed your thumb,

is a scar shaped like a semicolon

I no longer explain myself to anyone. On the train

I held on tight as the blue flickered on her face

like grief's oblong shadow her eyes

a pair of hemlock leaves in water. Why is it colder

on the brightest days, Jeff? What was it that you doodled

sometimes on my chest after sketching yourself

all over me? After your fingernails raised the trees

on my skin, traced their tethered trembling, even the ground

beneath our backs quivering like tectonic trauma

These days I take my mouth to war. I spend it all; 

words I had once saved. Do you think I really lacked

the currency of anger? Or do we house

a swan each— swan in black water, swan

with empty eyes, folded swan waiting for flight

on a blackberry night even as the sky is

  breaking

a Bowie-thunder on our chests. I know almost nothing about tattoos.

I know nothing of love. Only something about the way

grief breaks the surface of the skin

and leaves us untied. How are you these days, Jeff?

How is the birthmark on your thigh – the migratory birds

compassed to the south

How is your swan coping? A study released last night says

you should keep swans in a room with enough

windows to provoke flight

Sometimes I hear slow wingbeats above me. Wake and find

my sleepless hands graffitiing the soft language of yours

all over my bruises and brickwalls,       wishing

you’d return to spray-paint over it some indolent day.

All languages die natural deaths. In the afterword,

in a pool of silence we could

sit like swans,  

rest my head  

             on your wings

and above us, the clouds would raft away, a million

kites tattooed to the sky.