Calm gray dusk, your chronic presence-

I hear It’s voice echoing between trees,

drowning, suffocated by creeper canopies.

Behind my translucent reflection, I see

green blackness stretching to infinite.

A river of gravel, shades of gray painted

by the brush of an impressionist, twin

wires rising from the waters, dulled by

a million trans-American obligations. My 

recent trans American adventures never

crafting the mold, but following the stars.

Eleven weekends ago, stars staring down

on a field in the woods, you pointed to

Jupiter, invisible beacon behind trees

clothed with summer night. Or maybe,

grounded twin stars arrested my vision,

limiting Jupiter’s influence to bittersweet,

interstellar weekend trips to D.C. or Philly.

Every depression in my body is half-filled.

Your head on my shoulder, your fingers

in my hair, your shadow in the aisle seat.

Your absence defaces the walls of my heart.

And as I see how the gray leather stretches

from beneath me, I long for you to make 

it whole, to repaint my atria, that we may

leave it empty as you complete my house.

Every night, we’ll go stargazing in the yard.

Loose words will become balloons, returning

to July’s constellations. We’ll follow them as

they become luminous. We’ll be swallowed

by the totality of evergreen trees, everblack,

untainted by nightly reflections. Everstill,

having finished their adventures and making

whole the hills where they were planted.

Every night, I stare at my translucent reflection 

in a computer screen deflecting my words

in our pair of distant one-sided conversations.

Every night, I hear your compressed voice, it’s

true timbre tainted by hundreds of miles of

internet connections. Every night, half-asleep,

I lie half-alone with your memory, yearning for 

Liberty Hills to wake up without depressions.