There is nothing of her body he can’t

conjure—texture, heft, taste, or smell.

This is heaven, and this is also hell.

He can dream the way moonlight comes slant

through the window, illuminating breast

and breast, her navel a shadowy pool

he drinks the darkness from, her skin grown cool,

and her lips and her lips and all the rest.

If she were here, he thinks, and he thinks too

much, he thinks. He thinks too much when she’s here,

and when she’s gone. And the window’s a mirror

he’s all alone in. If he could say he knew

every night would be made of her, a thigh

in the true air, her long, elegant spine

blossoming forth from the clothes on the line,

he would have asked, he would have asked her why

the sigh of the evening breeze is her tongue

and the rose of his cast off shirt his hand

unfillable and trying. He can stand

and go and find her still-damp towel among

the morning’s last mementos, and the shape

of her ear, a whorl on the pillow’s white.

He can feel the whole weight of her at night,

and the weight of her absence, and her hip.