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Stephen M. Dickey

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A Lifetime's Death in Love

You couldn’t tell him anything, and that
with so many conversations behind him,
you’d think he’d have gotten the hang of it.
And there were days just cradled in some unseen mechanism.
I think that’s how we put it all behind us--
striving through to your equidistant smile,
your precision stare locked on to nothing.

Nights we were each following your mute
whereabouts through the cobbled streets,
looking for eternity’s stint in those pavements,
taking the trajectories of whatever loan-words
we could get our hands on. And that was
where he first saw the death in his own headlights.
He tried to get it out of his system,
only to realize later that it was
the system.

But pain worked well as a makeshift anaesthetic.
The mass wasting of cliffs into shorebound waves
and those variables bound by the clouds only
were the best suicide any of us could have
hoped for. They knocked the wind right out
of him, took the words right out of his mouth.

And so he died past himself for the umpteenth
time, a little farther. No one knows for sure
how many times this happened, or why:
everyone had been good as well as bad,
and had procrastinated in both.

Said she never saw him again, not
that she particularly cared to: the roads
to hell are all paved with blue-eyed dreams,
horizons of saintly hills and so
many vanishing points to choose from
it’s impossible to tell where which one of him
ended up, what really went on

 

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