Breath

“They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.”
—James Wright

I know now that love tumbles through space
with the lightness of a moth,

follows the restless wander
of a marble on an uneven floorboard.

I knew you through the whorls on my fingertips,
those faint trails of amniotic current that mean precisely

nothing, though they are my own.
When I loved you, I was trying to say who I was.

For that, I am sorry.
Flesh of my flesh,

the years between us howled like a child,
swaddled, placed in a boat, cast adrift

on an endless northern lake, free to find
whatever home she could.

There is water everywhere. I see it now.
In the air, the soil, in the thousands of breaths

I breathed into you as we lay together.
The idea of “destiny” is a blunt instrument,

but it does the work. I have given up
trying to explain you away.