this is where your fingers think of pipes

This is where we come to kiss. And this is where they go to die. And this is where you buried Jasmine, drifting East in a metaphor. This is where she rose from the grave, covered in snow. This is where you saw her ghost. This is where you came in a pillow. This is where you came to die. It is where a baby shoe balances on the knob by the crosswalk. It is where coffee stirs and your fingers think of pipes.

Nervous, slender fingers. Guitar fingers, you think. And the girls who wear long jackets with short skirts in the winter, handing out pamphlets at intersections. Delicate, deliberate fingers. Cold, drinking fingers. The callous on the right middle finger--your pen callous. Your words make alterations to your flesh. These fingers don't take rings. These fingers age without your lover's face to touch.

This is where you will stay. There is no need for stolen moments. Baby, where is your tongue?

On balloon hands. That rubber, stretching and snapping, wet, sputtering, dusty, sticky, static feel. She has been living in those warped and elongated distances. Has begun to believe that you exist without touch.

How dare you try to break that silence. Don't make us laugh. This is where you keep the rest of it to yourself.

As You Begin to Disinhabit the Air

And it was the picture I did not take of the girl at the tea shop that I search for a place to hang on my wall.

That you knew but said nothing.

I will count the times I did not touch your face. The little restaurants we didn't visit in the afternoons. The necklace I meant to place inside a tiny drawer for you to find.

The nouns you would not call me. The verbs of course un-acted.

The window we never found a moment to sit at and watch the rain, which never fell so long as I knew you. Those Texas thunderstorms I recalled but which kept their distance from that room I less than inhabited.

The flower I could not find the moment to place in your hair.

These will all fill the spaces of my new walls, and I will carry them into the town and set them in little paper boats to be carried away past the folks wading in the creek. And I will carve them onto the sides of mountains with a long finger, the one you nearly kissed, but eventually refrained.

You are full of wonderful thoughts you never had, and overflowing with words not spoken.

There is even less air here. Where I am. Perhaps not merely the altitude.