This is not a poem for B_,
or her other redacted twin,
like the others I have heaped
and stored on microchips,
abandoned handrails, caught in the
chattered teeth of change-drawers.
Small poems made of her.
In rooms of her. Onto orchards of her.
Look, I cannot even finish her name,
only cut an outline.
I sit here. I remember. I wait.
For word of her. But
How much more skin can I say of skin,
and how much more darkness can speak
of its homesickness? She is never the
same ravan
that bespeaks herself,
the crow on the nearby branch, or the
swallow I have never seen cry,
from a river I have never seen.
This is a poem for that woman,
what it scarcely makes of her.