It’s all that’s left for us now
that the messages, without destination, tumble
to the far reaches of time: the coffee’s cold—
its grounds left for me to finger over & through
in hopes of finding direction before the roads
turn to gravel, go to seed, become horizon;
and because it was your favorite song
that last terrible spring when the possibilities
seemed as limitless as the rain that fell the winter before,
it comes to me now, a faint echo surging with the sun
as it rises from Greenville-Natchez-Baton Rouge—
until I’m lost in it, nothing to do but sink in
to the dark, fluff-mud of the bottom,
rub it into my eyes, over my chest, as if this
were the one moment we were both bathing in,
as if this were something we’d both call love.