CIRCUMFERENCE

I will see you at the end, in the caboose. I will be the one with my legs crossed, practically folding into myself, reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I can almost imagine our meeting: You won't notice me at first, the light reduced to its smallest hour, I'll turn and call your name, my voice caving in the silence.

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I was asleep. Five-hundred-and-fifty-three miles away. I thought there would be a sign, a flash in the night sky. A noiseless jutting me awake. You too lay asleep. Frost formed on a window. The daises I sent crumpled into a vase of drear water. You slept through the night, saintly.

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I was out of my body looking back over my shoulder, looking back into the future. We are running through the Southwest Corridor. Already it is October. and ginkgo leaves litter the brick walk— As always you’re three strides ahead. This is a non sequitur.

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I walk into my house. Everything seems agitated: the kettle roundly screams and spits steam like a geyser. Do you hear a din from the freezer? The moon is nowhere, as if she knows. Now I understand The depth of the deponent: Tonight I am thinking I had not thought.

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I never know what to say. I wanted to say: Yes, we'll be strong (but the word strong implies stronger than)... I was attempting to restore. Place things in any order. but I was lost (am lost) in the bells' chimes. All I could do was nod and hold your hand.

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I was in the kitchen, not listening to you. Your words were innocuous, each vowel ringing in the rafters. A flat chord. A piano needed tuning. Two brown sparrows rested in the rhombus of the window. I chopped garlic and onions fixed on possibilities.

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I met you early on Monday. I drove through Concord, the sun buckled over cloud-cover; and the town, still alabaster with snow, began to thaw: The drugstore had a sign in its window: PIPES MENDED, OPEN FOR BUSINESS, and snow impended from rooftop edges unable to fall against its center.

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We drove to the airport. The traffic on Storrow Drive was awful. You skirted through Back Bay in hopes of bypassing. We failed and were caught in traffic that crept past the Public Gardens. The swan boats, were retired, sheeted in tarps for winter. The scene was a line from a Dickinson poem.

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Remember Rockport in March? Pigeon Cove; the sandbar stretched for miles, and made a perfect U around us in low tide. It took hours to walk the brim's distance. You never worried about the tide's bad custom of surging, leaving us stranded, never worried the sand would refine. You were in love with the sea's rhythm.

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Mister, I know you too well. The refined way you exit a room—Your soles dust the parquet floor, the potted peonies stir in your wake, the walls await your return. I find myself facing the window as the cusp of summer slowly unhinges against a fall breeze. We will meet again, you and me, as the rain descants, returning to sea.

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Today I am making plans to return after leaving Massachusetts. I have hungered to drive across the Sagamore Bridge to Race Point in autumn. Relearn the tides' patterns. I've never made this journey alone. I will pass Hyannis, Wellfleet, Truro, streaming on like an arrow. Undulled until I touch the touchstone.