In New Mexico all those years ago
when I saw foreshadowed me decades later
like the tumbleweed I indeed became,
I thought it unbearable
that I should be there alone.
So it was I found a phone in those days
before we carried them in our pockets.

All I could remember as I said whatever I said
was the memory of the river running red and my
absolute insistence—my longstanding argument,
the one I always needed
to win with him—that here again
I would hold the higher vision without fail
and this time your ship would not sail without me.

I saw that night too my future self—strong, yes,
but still bereft in the storm, unfased by the killer
who pulled up in the drive but nevertheless
forlorn, perpetual object of scorn.
I kept trying to change the image then,
twenty years before it came clear in the end again
that you would not deviate or alleviate the suffering of all.

It was not a wasted quarter, even though
even there the very people I treasured knowing here
as then plotted and schemed and I, oblivious,
sat sharing my heart, divying it up
in little parts that were flung to a far horizon.
But twenty years later I went back to pick them up
and found them as I sang at the top of my lungs,

Knowing full well I was anything but done.
And then two years after those desert days
and the walk of the bones through France
all the detail came in a rush
from a brush with an artist and the resurrection of
our love's long lost story. What was my hurry
to paint the sorrow as if it would change tomorrow,

Which is of course now today? So now I float
above the cloud in a house built like an ark and swim
with sea turtles. And still it is not the same without you.
Nothing ever is. Always I am
rifling through time, in some futile attempt to turn
the page and find dimensions of that single story
so fleeting, lost somewhere in the beating

Of my heart, ever set adrift and apart
from the fullness of life. It was not ever truly possible
without you in it. "So you sail. So be it."
Isn't that just what I said
two thousand years ago when you were off in a huff,
having said it is enough? But too it is different.
There are no letters here, no memores are mine.

I, lost in time, nothing but a tumbleweed—
drifter, dreamer, dancer on the wind, certainly
never a lover, confidant or friend. I sail
on the open sea but fail to connect
anything with anyone. The echo always comes in waves
that say it is too late, finished, forgotten forever.
Here, I flounder, floating upside down,

tumbling through time.