Romance for Switchbacks

By maddening grass and muddy flash that slopes the forest’s    rising hem, you hike up, singing until he comes unsungor comes down from the city you made love inside.    Watts and walls filter want through the world until a coldspine is the axis of one beloved eclipsing the other,made dust by dawn. Dark heart, vow down. This time, you will

will what’s breakneck in you beyond breaking. And the unmade    forests’ eros racing to its exit, and the groaning, green shudders by    rain that did so, and the wet coast—he’ll press to the curve as if    a spineunsung inside you, and curve your moving under. You used to rise    coldly in the city’s rooms, until what’s kingdom was what’sinside them still, unmoving. Once he saw you at the door,

    or dreamt the handle turning, you letting him inside.Made of love you came, and, remade, you leave, he knew, made ill.What spools between feeling’s apertures contracted in the cold    by which you saw forestsrise over you like lovers who kneeled in his place. Now he’s sun-stung,    spine your old arrow at rest, and what he spills resembles rain,

    rain spills scent like a body each time it’s laid under a pine,    inside nothing, and you weep. You’ve seen what’s steeper than a door.Unsung signal banged it down the day domesticating crieswilled what’s forest out of your room, and the fires that made    forests swallow their selves almost passed you by.Cold, bedded in the ash, germ and gold, a doubled past passes what’s

whatever winter mistook him for. You, too, fell asleep in a cold,    spinning rain:by the bright, fluorescing roots of a city, all shut doors gesture at forest.    Do or double back—enter and be entered as men pick a fruit with    no inside. Unmaking love—did you confess it all? He willrise inside your tonight, cross the body all over, and name what unsung

    sun guns down the trees’ ghosts, the wind a gold needle risingcold over the earthly flesh. Surely, an echo is what’s    willing to be fed to, cut down, turned over in a hollow and    remade—rain everywhere you look, love repeating in stereo, your name plus    pine.    Inside a city, he loved you clearly, the end between you like a door.For that, reforest. Two faces undress and walk by, and by, and by.