I don’t know who kidnapped who. Your voice

 

like my own breath behind my burlap sack,

hand clenched around my wrist. We were bound

 

in this place, tottering and about to collapse.

 

It used to be an ocean here, the land covered in the Devonian sea,

Nurse sharks nesting in the watery meadows underneath.

 

Marine birds migrate on the tide’s anamnesis, expert hydrographers. And your face

was buried in my floating hair

 

like a small boy who barely escaped. You joined the resistance,

planted bombs in women’s Jacuzzis and behind the melodeons.

 

I saw you in the club. Blood smeared on your face when you sang.

You have a creepy subtext, I said, just like me. Two gunmen in our masks.

 

The coyote trots down the middle of the suburban street

 

and a rabbit was caught and skinned on the barbed wire again.

But bless us. Our violent desire. Our violent want.

And bless, swooping over our heads and out of the dark, bless

 

the nightjars,

folding their wings over the bracken of our grieving hearts.

 

I just wanted to be beloved, weave your veins through the loom

of my bones.

                             Bless the tree lightning-seared and charred.

Bless the upturned grave, mapped with reindeer lichen.

 

Bless our scars.