I haven’t met you yet. I’m out the door,
late for a bus, suitcase spilling open,
disgorging my life so far.

He was not himself. He was just a shell
                a hermit crab had made into home
                                awhile, then left behind.

Out of the darkness, into the light,
you’ve tripped: the bulb by the back door
illuminates a fierce scrub brush on legs.

Night fell on the rain, rain fell on the dark,
indifferently. Clouds hooded the moon.
A heart-shaped leaf shook under the weight

His new heaviness he inhabits
all the way to the fingertips,
as if lunch were a rehearsal

Winter, with each woolly breath, I lie.
I have been unfaithful. Wearing next to nothing,

We were too late to catch the moon,
already hauled from the swamp
and hung up to dry. Moon melon,

Some pets, Horace says, spend their lives
going over the same old ground: some suburb
      of love. A parking lot

I thought I knew something
about loneliness, but I was wrong.
I'd never been that far east before,

To the canyon that came so close
to touching me, I was nothing.
What good was a truck gearing down

Because the painter knew that history,
when it happened, happened in Venice,
it's on the steps of the Riva

  Where is paradise without the gate?
Ask any gardener, his bags of bonemeal busy
  keeping the weedy world at bay.
Within its boxwood walls, like that great kitchen