Here’s a Love Poem to the Songwriter Driving Home

I try to explain it. How
each time you drift
your arms from the

handle-bars like a conductor
I lose you. I’ve lost
people, I say—my face, I’m sure

like mountain trees blushing
red with their long-kept
illness. I won’t lose you

to a bike-ride. But I’m most
afraid because you
look beautiful this way,

your arms suspended
there in a shrug
or an and anyways

a this is just who
I am, what can
I do? as easy as if

I weren’t there at all.
And anyways, even
at my happiest, there is

always (there will always
be), a rope of road on which
I consider the after-

life most. This small
look, this glance
away. This flashing of

light of loss of
relief. Life goes on
but for whom? For ghost-

me arriving home,
eating dinner, hugging
my parents? I can’t

help myself
but cry and yell and
leave you, leave to

somewhere the people
I’ve lost haven’t
lost me. To my mother

believing life after
death—we come
from the earth, we return

back to the earth. To the
mouse in the warm
dark, space enough

for almost two of
itself. Sometimes I am
my mother’s Earth,

receiving everything
wanted, then more.
I am back to the bike,

to you, like a too-new
language in my mouth. You,
who remembers

the moon as I do
the night you first
played, its Earthshined

palms out-spread,
holding me, thinking
how the eddy

of a voice might fill me
completely. Alright,
then I won’t do it

around you anymore.
How I balk, and wish to
revise, rewind, put you

back where you were
for that moment, your arms
flying. This look, this

glance away at me.
At how love makes
new fears—makes me

a person who I wish
and I don’t wish
to be. Who is sorry.

Who thinks he knows,
who knows this
is the only way

he could have killed
her, told only to trust
in God, making

gods of them.