56

There's my building on the corner
You can leave me across the street
Just before you drive away, say something to me
Say something I can keep and fall asleep to
and remember from everyplace I go
so that you've said it in my kitchen,
in the library, on the train to the places that you don't know;
so that I've heard it over thunderstorms,
dinner conversations, quiet songs.

And I don't even remember your voice anymore.

Or what you wore, what you were doing with your hands.
All that's left is the words
dangling over my head.

55

I've never doubted that it's the walls
that decide I can hear car doors slamming
but not footsteps.
Getting back from the airport
and stumbling in from the bar
to a house on the street,
they sound the same to me.
They both accompany a man with blue eyes,
the one who mows his lawn on Sunday morning
keeping a complacent eye
on the skipping child on the sidewalk.
I hear him slam the door,
and I close my eyes and watch him
go into his house, and stay up for a while
to watch the cars I hear go by.

54

You can put me in prison
and replace my name with a number
You can patch it to my uniform.
But at least give me a new one
when I'm released from the room
so dark and so quiet
the door may not be there,
or anything else behind it.
Because I haven't been to space before,
and when I come back,
I don't want to be
the only thing that hasn't changed.

53

I was alone when I laid down
in the middle of my bedroom floor
and all I did was close my eyes
when I felt the creak of the wood behind me
your hand on my arm.
The next day you wouldn't remember
how I am
when no one knows that I'm awake
or the shadow the lamp makes on my back
when I'm where I shouldn't be
so I tried to fall asleep
before I had to feel you leave.

52

I don't want to control my limbs anymore
I want waves to make me tumble
so I can only think to breathe
I want to sleep without a dream
while you sit by my bed
and look at me

51

I changed while you were in Moscow,
or when you studied in Kiev,
where you met the man at the bar
who asked you if you were happy.

And I changed when you went
the deepest in the woods you've ever been,
and when you found in that antique store
something perfect for a second,
but then you'd looked at it too long.

When you returned, I was different,
waiting there on your porch.
You'd decided, somewhere in the mountains,
that I could have left if I was tired.

50

You were away enough to be anyone
and here enough to be real
and on the phone I decided
it didn't matter what you said
as long as you were like me
with your back against a wall
sitting on a bed

and as long as your words didn't matter
they were always the right ones
just don't ever let me see the place
you take your phone calls from.