Cold

When I think of her
I see the way her eyes would soften when she used to laugh
Or the way she looks sternly
How she turns at the corner of her mouth

How happy I was
How she was too

I could hang up every day
Up
On the bar where I keep my towels
I miss the homework.
I miss the cues.
To be, and to breathe
We would take all the months people call winter
And hold onto those too.

She would take my hand
And give me back my pen
And she would help me
Dot the I’s and cross the t’s in summer.
I never knew another.

When I would thrash
When we would thrash together
And we would find the sound in the noise
Half past the lovers and the dreamers
Soaking in the rhythm and blues of September

We made a pool out of dew drops
We sold sand to the islands
We found a way to make sense
Of the streaking lines and circles
The backwards acrobatics
The four or five AM records
That broke the bed and shattered the window
And collapsed everything
That couldn’t withstand the gravity of our love

The last thing I heard was the tear drop.
When I ripped the leaves off the trees and called it autumn,
It gave me reason to believe
That everything would be okay in the end.
That the picture was still being painted around me
Like the world I painted for myself
With you
And without you.
I knew it would never be the same
But how could I know it would be so different.

How cold she had become
When her hair had turned blue.

How could I ever learn to fall out of love again.
How would I even begin.

After I’ve already written
more than ten thousand words that carry your name
but you were always the one
with the prettier handwriting.

I do this to myself, don’t I
I’m the one that just has to put his dreams on paper
And make those papers into trees
And make those trees into a landscape

After all this time
I was supposed to say “Always”
I had one line to say.