Together

The wear in my knees tells me already

I’m going to die,

though I have only been eternal a handful of times,

and our paths are converging only for the tread of these few years.

Your flickering eyes – the finely veined fallen leaves of autumn –

will see ten thousand sights

before closing in a dusty clamp, a private pocket of ground.

The notched ivory keyboard of your spine,

where once I played with silent fingers

the discordant symphony of cartilage,

will dry and go still,

locked by my brief memory

– the same span as one quivering aorta –

into this muscular moment.

Let us try to forget that we do not have forever…

Find your hat and we’ll take a drive,

enjoying the absent-minded summer air and

brief contact of our floating atoms.

We will forget each other before the end.

Here, now, we will ignore the mossy, irrevocable future

While I, at least, cannot deny the certain quiet comfort of knowing that someday

We’ll be lying in the same earth.