The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.