The Sunken Head Rears in Windows

a.

Once, in the apartment above

Union Square, she threatened to push

me out the window. She stood

behind me, her arms locked around

my shoulders like wet branches,

like a lover but more so, closer, nearer.

You must move forward she said and

used her mass to move me to the sill.

Because I knew her well, I slowly removed

her arms and drew an alternative from her brain:

Let’s make your poster of Sid Vicious 
into an oversized paper airplane.

So we sent the dried-blood/black and white drone

on  a lazy spin over the Square,
watching it briefly gain

momentum as it sailed by the statue of Gandhi,

grazing his baked-bean face, then landing in a crumple

beneath a bench where city squirrels, ashen and overly-

friendly,  began to investigate the image of anarchy.

b.

We emerge from ourselves moment by moment.

Etching out our finer, crystalline shapes,

we release the vapors like shredded

skins of frost on double panes of glass.

It is happening always, as every moving

day of November is a little more December.

As the brain of your infant-self expands,

pushing the gelatinous skull outward,

upward to where air grows thinner.

c.

Sucking on a Marlboro,  up 5^th Ave,

every step I take I am farther from her:

17^th, 18^th, 19^th,  cross streets cross us here, there...
she is behind me. My smoke

sails backward into her eyes: Reversals,

her reflection smoldering  in storefronts.

I reach the Flatiron where the center

captures us in glass—we merge like binary stars, a

bundle of smoke and past.

When I skid around the corner of the ever-widening

structure, she becomes lost, sunk in subway steam.

d.

I have never trusted numbers.

We become in letters, words, sentences

said, and broken,  then said again, running on

and on and on the hour, by the hour, the seconds

are made of strung vowels, landmasses

of layered consonants. From these we form.

I have never trusted numbers:

they are voiceless.

e.

Years and words later, I sit,

facing a third-floor window.

Below are tree tops--branches 

spread like neurons—ripped vein red.

I see her behind me, my sunken-self,

her smoked skin merging

with the reflected blood of the maple.

Closer, nearer.

f.
You must move forward,

we say.