I remember you like a sea
an artifact of beauty
I could rationalize in bones,
the décolletage
of a fish

such a composition etched into me
like a second skull,
the Red Sea
calling
ancestors in a play
of shadow and
light upon water
that caused me to recede

I remember receding
into new anatomical depths,
the sands of our spines
bleeding into oceans;

once you may have met me
in Abyssinia,

the image of you always characterized
by distance,
re-memory
I bring you back in waves of wax
and gold, for our love
was always an unearthly idea
impossible for any image

we were trying
trying to
immortalize
rather than come and go

but even sensations of old
will stop moving, which is why
we have
used each other up

my own chest now
sinking at the thought, the dispersion
of grief into a poem,
ocean,
recollection of bones

for the sake of all archeologists
who revisit what has gone
only to return to themselves

just as ex-lovers and historians must
recall
in order to forget.

————————————–