Ashes am I of all that once I seemed.
          —Millay¹

Death astride two worlds, life
          can’t follow a suicide, not
          the way echoes of your
          exit do, tiptoeing through corridors
          of minds those shadows of
          your presence bend against, spent
          quiver thrown as fingers grip
          to splinter to grasp a

bow broken in the tension
          of pulling out, of going
          knowing what others won’t, of
          throwing down the why this
          hunt insisted you hide, your
          motive a type of unkindness
          only silence refines, every inch
          of your absence dripping unrolled

tides roaring warnings that a
          Sagittarius is never worth his
          f(l)ight, your pursuit my plight
          foolishness avails, paves an extension
          that perverts reason and pays
          a tension this condescension plays
          when making no sense at
          all, oblivion taking at once

its time and toll, emptier
          every year, this hunger won’t
          carry me but I’ll take
          it everywhere, the Colossal Love
          made, incrementally, a little more
          bearable, infinitely more than some
          distancing memory of a large
          and beautiful man savage envy

pulled down before a crowd
          of none, no one but
          me to heed the ruin
          you seemed to become when
          I needed to be someone
          else’s priority, other than my
          own, you understand for once,
          then, this bleeding exhaustion of

placing my faith in a
          hypothetical god whose promised existence
          is contingent on my continuing
          my blindest belief in him,
          unsee(m)ing and all well-meaning, too
          much so that I must
          let you both go, casting
          below broken earth unspoken oaths.

__________
¹Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The Suicide”, Stanza 3, Line 7 (Line 23 overall), in Renascence and Other Poems of Poems, published at New York by Everyman’s Library in 2010; page 31.