Lines

I seem to have forgotten my lines...

Walk with me parallel a while

Pickup perhaps then I'll remember

I have no steady, no gyroscope to keep me up

At night the sleepcycle rides

     circles under my eyes

I haven't decided how to draw us

All of us--everyone we meet--

Intersect at certain points,

Moments of meaning

Millions of points where we touch, hold hands

Share a song, kiss, secret, or glance

Sometimes we run parallel for a time

Walking a bold line through space time

As everything spins we manage to keep step

But it's all temporary

Our made-in-China shoes scuff the graph

     paper as we approach infinity

And what nonsense is that

A closeness, a net?, a communion, or an empty

     space, a universal alone eternity?

I scribble along fast like a polygraph lie as I, trying

     not to forget to breathe

Trying not to veer wildly like my chestbeat

     and double back, cross myself,

My God I've been here before

I was hoping we could tie the knot

But the telephone line was not long enough

You ride along another axis now,

Existing, loving, singing, unseen

I always dreamed of your trajectory

Plotting it out, stoking you to dream

Your truck spiraled out

A flat line, an ellipsis

Of rocks in the desert, memorial gardens

I take pictures

Make five-year plans

See lines in everything:

Handprints, walls, sunsets, trees

Each barcode a stanza,

Every vine and weed draws shapes

And you and me

We part here, branching out like

     family trees approaching infinity

And although like particles we may

     collide, we will never occupy the same

     space and time

At best our lines run tangent

But not yet, I reach

You're out of reach

You're gone

And I'm still writing on writing on moving out past the sea

Living, yes, writing reading speaking moving always moving