He’s done writing, the coffee that keeps the tongue awake.
He leaves for the car, next to it finds a necklace,
and wonders, was it dropped by a woman,
reeled away by a flood. Was there time, at least, for touch,
knowing there is nothing to add that subtracts from goodbye.
The intersection’s a straight face blinks, ‘no,’ ‘yes’.
Shadows of birds look to him like parenthesis of flight.
A man from Jamaica waves from an island for a cab.
He writes much of this down on the back of a map of the north.
He writes how stories seem to flow back into their silence,
yellow and brown in the greens of lakes.
He writes of contrails drawing upstream,
and stones of hardened creeks cupping them in the way
he brings the echo of her vanishing to his lips.