I want you with me, and yet you are the end

of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms

have become public? How we glance to see if--

who? Who did you imagine?

Surely we're not here alone, you and I.



I've been wandering

where the cold tracks of language

collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.

Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold

of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.



If you asked me what words

a voice like this one says in parting,

I'd say, I'm sweeping an empty factory

toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.

I'm just a broom, sweeping.