the cruelest

There are two black socks on my bedroom floor.
To love something you must consider its absence
From another city, looking up at the same ripening moon, mine over poet's walk, his over union square, he considers the stresses on my body: the anniversary, the moon's achey pull, the persistent whiplash, the transition problem.
I am grateful for the way the sun blinks against those red bricks, eases the mind along our outlines. This is your time of year, my father said the other day;
there have been locks and rubberbands, red and yellow pills, broken glass, officers of the law. There was melted wax, an insomniac butterfly, phone cords pulled from their walls,
walls that thinned, linings that thinned, perfume sprayed over husbands, boats tipped and journals thrown in the sea. This is my time of year. I am opening old important and tattered books, stretching my head from side to side, letting damp things begin to dry. I leave the socks where they are, like a kind of punctuation...