Mathematicians still don’t understand the ball our hands made, or how your electrocuted grandparents made it possible for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes. It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window to leave six ounces of orange juice and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming the sand you dug your toes in, on the beach, when you wished to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes of strangers, and your breath broke in waves over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out over the opposite lobe, and my first poems under your door in the unshaven light of dawn: Your eyes remind me of a brick wall about to be hammered by a drunk driver. I’m that driver. All night I’ve swallowed you in the bar. Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed eyelid along your inner arm, dried raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know where to run when the cops came. Your body is the country I’ll never return to. The man in charge of what crosses my mind will lose fingernails, for not turning you away at the border. But at this moment when sweat tingles from me, and blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk, I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body with smoke, and the lies came like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents they orchestrate, and I swallowed a hand grenade that never stops exploding.

I used to think love was two people sucking on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger, but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape, traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth. I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers from a phone line, and you promised to always smell the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts. I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord around my ankle and yanked me across the continent. And now there are three thousand miles between the u and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much I’d jump off the roof of your office building just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see what the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there, and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver, hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire. And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants, naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes: Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers, so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo, and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint, washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes, like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth, like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste, and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin, and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers, and to never neglect the first straw; because no one ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring  that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect  of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel.  Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt under the blanket  of your voice, said I guess there’s two kinds of women.  Those you write poems about, and those you don’t.  It’s true. I never slid sonnets under the door, or served you  haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping  Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window  at three hundred a.m., whisky doing push-ups  on my breath. I worked within the confines of my character,  cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan  of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch  of electricity, power never put to good use. What  we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if  we caught one another like a flu, and desire was merely  a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex.  Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Ben Franklin  of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune  to your waterfall scent, haven’t developed antibodies  for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed  before humans hammered a word on it, or how many  paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean,  or why the light of a candle being blown out  travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s freshly lit,  but I do know all our huffing and puffing  into the other’s throat–as if the heart was a birthday cake  covered with trick candles–didn’t make the silence  any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scribbled  on your neck were written in disappearing ink, sorry  this poem took thirteen years to reach you. Sometimes  I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out  of my ear, and when I slept, you’d press your face  against the porthole of my submarine. I wish that just once,  instead of joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away  like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered  the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated  a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row has agreed to publish my collected letters to you. The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility. Unfortunately I never mailed the best one, which certainly was one of a kind. A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking, I surrendered my identity in your eyes. Now I’m just like everybody else, and it’s so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the way someone falling down in the street is funny. I entered a revolving door and emerged as a human being. When you think of me is my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest satellite dish in the universe, your smile as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed. Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder. I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand. I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence so far, without spilling a drop.