You are seventeen, your name
is Sally & you
get wet

to leave it empty on the shores of time,
and shining, will mean to live and write

Scrub and stone, show me
a passage through to set me free

But here at a thousand metres and more in the Apennines
hasn’t time come round again with summer

And so it happened that the two sat down
to a contest: with the blank sky sprawling
above them, the pale sun filtering through cracks

Morning came, in buckles and lace,
asking to be held. The birds began
with sultry murmurs, their notes soon rising like sirens.

The things that abandon you get remembered different.
As precise as the English language can be, with words
like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describes only that leaving. Once,
drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have
dismissed him in the way that the youth dismiss it all:

Beasts
At the threshold
Rats

The ivory wedding hat came tumbling down—
how long had it been stored away, untouched
like desire repressed and bound—

I’ll be waiting down by the broken mailbox,
            sniffing for letters.