Before M-5

When the tropes
of lilac and dusk have
bled from my world, you

will be the only
denseness
left for me
to enter.

But it is
exclusively
in lilac and dusk
that I see you
anyway.

It is at the denseness
of two things mingling
in ferocious overlap—

marked by dusk
marked by lilac—

that we ever really meet.

It is not Ann Arbor
and it is not Sylvan Lake or
the exact distance between but, rather—

the galaxy of distances
and all that is capable of overlap, contained
there within.

The day we drove
the entirety of Pontiac Trail

I felt myself keenly
as I was
at every age
I have ever been.

We took a nap
inside the beading car

in front of a video store—
as if the voyage were that demanding.

Remind me again of the metaphor
embodied
by my choosing to piss into
a dry bathtub
stranded in an open field

instead of the field
itself.

What shirt were you wearing
beside me
at the secret point of land

counting
whitecaps?

That the dusk
and the lilacs
are so brief
is the only metaphor
necessary.

Find me sometime
in abrupt coolness
licking
abrupt dense darkness

straddling the inky pit
where two yards meet

between the skunk
and the possum

counting aloud
the number of blossoms
I feel tantruming
in some lost organ
within me—

in the dusk
and lilac
we dim into
a holy vagueness

where I saw you
most clearly.