Panama #3

When I almost died
in those waves I crawled
out of the ocean like it was
the first time—something evolved
and nameless. Squinting in the
unfiltered sun, coughing up seawater
on to the sand in the shape of your
face or of God's, I sat on the dunes
and wrote you a postcard. It may have
been a concussion. I didn't want to sleep.

Panama #2

I am
reminded of you while
reading Jack Gilbert, skating
by bus through teeming
mountains. The volume is
yours: one of the innumerable
borrowed and few I have
yet to destroy. There
are depressions though
on the sheen of
the front cover. Evidence
of a shuddering carelessness
endemic to me, my propensity
to set things down
so hard without
even looking.

When you
still loved me I would lie
in your bed while you
got ready to go out drinking, reading
poems one at a time. I wanted
to feel the weight of those words
on my tongue, dissolving
like hard candies to ropes
of sucrose that would thread
between my teeth. I never
understood why you would prefer
films to photographs
when isn't it always motion that turns
everything to shit?

Now I see
your perspective. Collections
bring cohesion, you were always
the most beautiful while dancing
and without narrative
what remains is a vase
without flowers--that sort of felt
idealism you never
believed in anyhow.

But darling, the same way
I pray it is not a sin to
read while so much rushes
past the windows, I pray
you were wrong about certain things.

That Panama is nothing
like Belize. That I did
love you even in the moment
when my hands so deftly
pulled us apart. That I will
not shatter the next
beautiful thing
I touch, and how
maybe there is
a pair of kid gloves
hidden somewhere
in your deepest
chest of drawers.

Panama #1

We set on the mountain
with the sun in pursuit
of new ways of living.

A stupid crush
on a pretty hostel worker who
missed her friends in New York
City, thinking there
must be a word for this--if not
in Spanish then in another
tongue--attraction bound
to momentum like dancing
while constantly picking up
speed.

And will
the wild rivers wash my body
clean? May I set new
clothes ablaze in the equatorial
sunset and drink coffee from between
the shoulderblades of the mountain
like taking the very earth
into my mouth? What little
difference it will make when
the toughest of my new
skin sloughs off crossing
the borders to home.

As in
the moments spent staring
across tables at one another.
Saying: "Is this more
or less real than what
we left behind?"
Not knowing if the answer
lay in the slow blinking
of eyes exhausted
by the raw and
the novel or in the thick
dreamless sleep
that came after.

To Declare

we fish
for cherries
with white bic lighters
clink glasses on stolen
rooftops and who really
can remember the names
of all those they have loved?
Our parents tried to do right
by us while living in the shadow
of their unbound youth
and in exchange we grow
bags under our eyes
like rings around rings
inside tree trunks, meaning
to declare:
“we will only add
to your history.”