It was instant January when we met.

You snowed me in and brightened

the landscape. You kept coming,

piling on your singular design

for affection until even the horizon

surrendered behind you.

Just the vague, rounded corners

of the city remained: cars parked

then forgotten beneath your blizzard

of one. For twelve hours, endless

and unbroken, you were

an unstoppable seduction

of wedding-white, the future

all gossamer as far as the eye cared to see.

Finally, when I touched you,

the imprint of my hand remained.

It could be that easy.

 

Or it could be the morning

of the mourning after, how, slowly,

you began to harden,

resisting even my fingertips

at the corners of your mouth.

No longer were you among the falling,

faithful accumulation of secrets.

It took weeks, but the leaving

had started. Pine needles

shook free from your weight.

Haikus of frost dissolved

from the windowpanes.

Rock salt burned pale halos

on the sidewalk. The impressions

my body left on your body,

shallow and ambiguous.

Even as you slept,

you seeped away, inch by inch,

until only a clear sheet of ice

glassed the porch steps—one spot

where I could continue

falling over you and over you,

where my hands opened wide for the fall,

and my fingers unfurled, bracing

for the soon-to-be, for the already,                   

                                    broken.