I like the smell of your apartment, the still scent
of iniquity and loneliness

Sometimes when the bus stops in traffic on the bridge
I can see into your kitchen window. It's like staring down into

a cut, cold fruit

Thank you for walking to Long Island City that night in November to buy me
eardrops
though I feared you

had disappeared in a fervor, in a fever, almost,
onto asphalt, cinematic;

I thought you had been swallowed
willingly into the hole of the plumb-dark city;
I imagined you had followed

a new sad script that led you
silent through

the unseasonably warm streets,
costumed in drunken stardom,
smiling in a stupid staged search

for Ithaca

(as if it were real, and here, and hiding)

I thought perhaps you'd walk until the black night turned blue

in a quiet defiant cry not to return to

the bed that sways and creeks,

the sink that spits, then leaks

relentless as the restless

wrench in our guts

which is what

we share: it's

this urge to

move to

a single

point,

then suddenly stop there.