If You Died Those months you breathed in all my joyfulness through the interstate of your body and sent them into silence I was thinking of the momentary space between songs, the birds chirping from the trees behind the church as the violence of the world happened each day, and the other quiet afternoons of your slumber, your disheveled mattress hair in my mouth, myself studying the sluggish strands of sunlight through the blinds, and instructing myself not to die. I didn’t die. But I survived not by faith in myself, but by faith in girls from warmer cities, who hold their hands up by instinct when they see a camera, whose eyes have mastered the manner of saying “don’t shoot” without voice. I am not trying to forget you; I am trying to remember others: Those boys rescued from terrorist camps—who spoke only vowels, who must have observed a more punishing sunlight, whose lives, too, were entire afternoons without end, who, over a decade had forgotten their own names. That, too, is silence. But it isn’t love. It isn’t counting the number of birds on the roof. It isn’t the thousand other things I thought of, waiting for you to awaken. It is only sorrow. Not greater than mine, but deeper. That certain words exist is a miracle. There are sentences we’ve never needed: Don’t shoot. I didn’t do it. Don’t leave me here. But here we live in entire cities with entire words and entire poems. Toward the end I divided you into parts. I believed your voice and your hands, distrusted your eyes, and enclosed myself in your warmth. If you died I would have slept each eternal night in love with you, knelt down in front of each cat in the street in love with you, spent each quiet moment remembering other quiet moments in love with you. But all I have now is listening to the quiet in love with you, and eventually the clouds will shift and I will be kinder and the echoes in the valley you’ve carved in my rib cage will ring out eternally until your name is just a soft voice lost in my body, a resident of my warmth, a possible soul, a new form of sunlight.
97