Lacemakers

Miles Away

20 Miles฀Away for I.B. We sat on the dock then, cider cans crushed and glittering. As you spoke, your fingers never stopped moving, lifting gravel, lifting bits of glass into one palm. What did I know about woundedness, how to carry it? I wanted to split my ribs open, on hinges, to pull you through. Life is dismantled by moments. The stadium in pieces on the river, blue, electric. The story is breaking. Dinah, your sister, liked sweet things, let the blood and body melt like a wedding cookie between her lips. Now, the host won’t swallow, and sweet tastes only like her own tongue. Your coat was cold when I leaned against it: not resting and not embracing, just two people touching, beside a river. And why I think of this, years later and miles away in a bar— One couple gets up to dance. There’s something desperate in how they push against each other’s bodies, stepping into one another and backwards into the dark. All those years ago, when you helped me to my feet, face pale in the stadium’s corona, your voice carried its own rhythm: I see that man again, he’ll die. Here. By these two hands. 21 A prism of streetlights, when we turned for the hotel. We walked a little apart, each globed in separate thoughts, and I remembered, too late, the spent cans, which currents, by then, were forcing out to sea. ...