This is serious, for I must give you up,

and you’re so anxious to make a move

I have to hold you, hound you back to see yourself —

Of all the little powers, erasing tenderness,

uprooting words of love, must be the greatest,

so dumb it leaves you in the conversation,

cutting away all the possible worlds to this

one vacant field, that you once filled

by bringing your witness in

and building up your thick black house

of hair and eyes, and your vineyard body’s

luxurious cultivation —

which is why it’s so abstract,

grapes you have to reconstruct

are lost to their tart juices,

as irretrievable good syntax babbling lips

to the good sense of your kiss,

the lucid language of your tongue.

If you can read that woman back now,

into life from this abstraction,

over these flat synapses to

messy slopes and banks,

jump then — I won’t follow you.

For whatever in going you give up,

some tangled beauty will remain.