Amputation

Originally published in The Louisville Review 

Amputation

It was a golden year.
Sadness returned that summer like water
in a paper bag. Entering               the house
was like returning to                    the other side
of the road. Or like returning to a previous life,
one in which you still called after me.
In this one, you                    never did.
But I like to pretend,          for if
you did, then maybe          it really was
a golden year. I’d find you kneeling
next to your bed, arms          pre-amputated
from a war too far                    away to be
mine. Asleep on                              the Brooklyn
train with your severed                    body: you
never held me. Uptown: I loved          to watch you
swallow. Earbuds in                              so deep
you had no ears at all. I watched               as song
trickled into your body: cough syrup,          bagged water. Song—
how we use it again and again                    to color
the pavement familiar. You colored it          brushfire, so bright
and heavy your girl’s monochrome coat          began
to exist again in splotchy red. And you     watched me, I tell myself—
though I was really just watching          myself—color it
pastel pink, the same soft shade of     his room, the same pigment
of skin—tired, untouched, turned   inside out
and stretched over a water hose like a limp sock.
Does the windmill remember the wind
that simultaneously ends
it and brings it back to life?   Mornings, I’d leave
your home for the buzz   of everything else, knowing
the entrance to your     home—the frame, the door, the threshold
itself—would be     amputated
                           when I returned.