There is no getting around the gun
In your mouth and the aftermath, a vast migration of stem cells
(We could become—anything—a membrane, a clean new
Set of lungs, whole heart, an artery to replace the one
That had toughened) that could have grown into
A crop of mauve scars, the lot
Of us, broken at the throat, bowered in the ink
Of last speaking, less pink against the paler walls—with this,
You have made of us a scruffy tribe.
Beautiful bright weapons
In the Novembering, Without you I am even fewer, less.
What an unlikely trundle you have left of
The two beds of the sky.
Pray I
Will be seeing you again, you
Bus-bound for some other country to be alive to die in, just
Not—here, in the roses and bitumen, the corrugated voices of such
Widow-murmuring, where the tenor, too large for good
Health, appeared on the last night of the year, alone on the snow-
Covered hill to sing.
The bindweed
Has no stairway to climb up to—
Look—in this one glass case, a breathless history
Of the unthinkable, each artifact
In the shape of a night-finding bluff or
A species that had never been named,
Sewn up by scars, Trafficking in salt, as I have.