An Ill Comparison

Your absent voice,
Another night
with a streetlight and blearly moon.

A train passes by-
shaking your house.
(My great love, in all of its fullness,
could never shake your house.)

Tell me how you loved me, if you loved me.
I will wait on your words, a troubling diagnosis.
while you offer me glass, smoothed by
a soft, lying tide.

I am not cut, despite my ache to bleed.
I want to stand on the truth of your heart,
to be sliced, and pared.

If only you would run before the Spaniards,
drunk and armed with letters.

I do not want to be touched-
but to be told.
My celibate mind,
a willing target-
a happy victim.


Now I may long to speak in
letters of your passion
but instead; In short,
my language is to weep.