There is an old love inside me that will not be lit
by sound. She is a lace imprint of breath
over a patch of verbena.

My eye. I have seen your reflection. The thrash
of nightjars in the burdock. A mirror
inside a coffin. The mouth
of a woman when she is kissed.

Psalm and power lines suture the town
in an electric web. In the earth's embrace
of rock and slope there is scarcely a tree,
no probability of a sail. The dirt under the victim's nail
will not catalog the last hill she walked.

What love do I, after my death, leave? What
is held there by the threads of my small name?

I have in the back of my skull. Blaze.
Do I have the same for you? Yes, always, it is the same,
a wish of the senses. The soul passes
through the silk edges of the portrait. Certainly

the weeds billow through her hair. Just as stars
gather in the dusk limbs of the willows. She
will not be preoccupied. Neither of us
will answer goodbye.