This meeting annihilated for a moment all the years between the present time and the days [gone by]. It was a new & inexplicable feeling like rising from the grave to me. [F]or I could feel his heart beat to the fingers’ ends—unless indeed—it was the pulse of my own which made me think so.
          —Byron¹

                    Ten…

This is the jackal’s portion,
unburied corpses, if we
talk about it we keep it
alive, this death is not the

                    …nine…

life I’ve had in mind, tonight
I might decide to revive
what yesterday we both un-
clothed, flesh the two of us once

                    …eight…

supposed would thrive on breath be-
neath cold soil, even if un-
lit, the warmth of imagined
light thrived in the minds where ad-

                    …seven…

miration died, complement
of indecisiveness to
this apotheosis those
opposed to it slow, once coiled

                    …six…

springs wait in embrace below
frozen earth before surface
brings them closer than we were
then, two shadows wintering

                    …five…

bleak as black coffee splattered
onto cold ivory, an
irony of patterns no
one bothers to find matters

                    …four…

when their meanings confront them,
not always very softly
or obviously but so
savagely, epitaphic

                    …three…

eruptions, utterances
ambiguity’s insid-
ious riddle destroys, hidden
inside when swallowed, how pride

                    …two…

denies only after its
necromancy’s art arrives,
this want of mine to make ours
that kind others realize

                    …one!

is a desire not just us,
but victims of silence’s
crime, atone for whenever
caught in a love that’s a lie.

__________
¹Lord Byron, in one of his journals, on meeting unexpectedly in adulthood and while exiled abroad Lord Clare, a former schoolmate and dear childhood friend with whom he shared a lasting, secret mutual affection, “[Article] 113. Pisa, Nov^r. 5^th. 1821” in Detached Thoughts, 15^th October 1821–18^th May 1822, holograph manuscript NLS Acc. 12604 / 4057, folio 149 at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, printed in ‘In the wind’s eye’: Byron’s Letters and Journals: Edited by Leslie A. Marchand: Volume 9: 1821–1822, published at Cambridge, Massachusetts by Harvard University Press in 1979; page 49.