I never trusted the supply—like love—it could dwindle,
or simply give way, the way everything externalized
and obvious in the daylight opened its shirt and revealed
its soft pale breasts, like spit on a sidewalk.
And there's a quiet inlet of oaks,
someone said, a brazen light,
and a perpetual return, another promised,
and someone was always having a bad time of it,
grim forecasts and the heart worn down,
punched-in shops on the highway where we bought beer,
and that spring we argued all night long,
night after night, and couldn't save the flame—all that
someone said, will be replaced,
like a city replaced by a meadow
and replaced by a city again—and the little shudder.
I got thinking of absent time, or time without us in it,
The world slept curled in its own foolhardiness.
And she came over the sleeping bag to me and seemed
not to mind who I was. We inserted words
into spaces in the rain. For weeks I remembered the words
and whispered them to myself, staggering down different
streets in different states, even on different trains as
the sounds were to unbearable to scream over.
They never caught us. The supply never went into us.
We missed them on the way to Mexico, to Puebla,
where eventually the line gave out. We slept on a bench outside a church. It was two days before she died without regaining consciousness.

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