Why I Believed in Moonlight Graham

I smelled death out here,
the lingering kind,
the kind I was certain would,
any minute,
be the end of me,


too

The grass was wet,
but it was rain,
and urine,
yours I suppose,
still rotting or nourishing the soil,
and the scent of our sedentary mess,

I knew we would meet our makers around the same time,
and it saddened me that you went first,

and that I was here,
on this wraparound porch without your arms around me,

but some time ago,
we started to trudge through the Winter of all of this,
one behind the other,
always the other way around,

through the frost on the live oak,
and the dead ones,
too,

sometimes I wondered about those ones,
if they witnessed others eat each other alive,
the way we had,
not that way,
but the other way,

but even with their arms,
they couldn't reach this porch,
or withstand the lightning,

and I didn't want them to,

I wanted to let this restless ending wash over me,
into the fissures of the forehead I had always hated,
into the creases of the palms that were never red enough,
up,
not down the back of my spine,
and over the pink divide in the back of my skull,

the one I never showed you,

and I wanted to go home,
back to Allisonville,
even though that wasn't home,
this was,

I just thought,
I just thought if all of this could wash me away,
it'd be like our little diorama never happened,
never breathed a word or an ounce of tragedy,

until the turn of the century,
when someone else played a hand of pairs,
many,
many Suns and Moons from now