by Cameron Morse
Here we must make separation And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.
—Ezra Pound, in his translation, “Taking Leave of a Friend”
No longer the wild one, the wildebeest, I have returned to my childhood home. It’s my turn to position myself and yours to leave me
standing in the driveway. If I hadn’t left you all those years ago to your own devices in Yantai, where would we be today?
What tabasco sauce might we, as cohorts, have snorted, what Xanax trips taken, hanging onto our shirttails? If I hadn’t left you
to secrecy of rain-drenched lips, twins you kissed on a crowded bus by accident, they presumed, the way my parents first slickened each other’s faces,
would you have grown more poems, my good gardener friend, patting down words in the dark soil of your mind? There are riches I robbed you of,
every departure a stab wound, every betrayal a traitor’s love entrenched. My memory is we kissed on Xanax, leaned across the aisle and locked lips, harbored a case of Natural Ice on a dry campus.
You were always falling in love with someone else. Now I understand why you tried to break into that church at night,
triggering the alarm, and found God in those flashing lights, the sensitive tip of the baton. I was already gone.
