Milwaukee

Milwaukee promises poetry
closer than tendon to bone:
it offers up floorboards, inches
upon inches of soft cedar
calling for my ghosts to settle deep,
asking me to send dust
spinning through the slats of yellowed light
leaking through paper blinds
left open, on the off-chance
I catch sight of your shadow.

What I know of Milwaukee
I could fit in two cupped hands –
three weeks worth, maybe,
or one side of a record –
just enough to lead my mind to wanderlust,
away from any task I take my hands to,
enough to sink like an isotope,
like music notes and age-old books
inside my skin. Milwaukee
did not exist before your voice
and it lingers, unexplained.

But I could revel in the unfamiliarity
of every lost step, rediscover
these clumsy limbs, slip between bricks
and hug the mortar close,
letting spring drip over the eave.
I could stop throwing the loss of you
against every surface, stop
pinning this rowdy grief
to walks and to sage green houses,
to cat dander and certain songs, to poems
and champagne and thick tangles
of starlings at liftoff,
a landlocked imitation of those startled gulls
we chased into flight.

It’s Milwaukee winter that lures me:
the front page of a book yet unwed to ink,
white walls without connotation.
I want the wolf shore,
the hard grey, the miles frozen deep
with static. I want to pause,
feel the blackness of my eyelids,
weight of my own lungs, and not see
that scorched sun that sunk the pier, not feel
the wind laden with grace, not laugh
at the glass-crowned waves
that swallowed us whole.