In the taxi alone, home from the airport,

I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept

creeping over the smooth plastic

to find your strong meaty little hand and

5

squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the

noble ribbing of the corduroy,

straight and regular as anything in nature, to

find the slack cool cheek of a

child in the heat of a summer morning—

10

nothing, nothing, waves of bawling

hitting me in hot flashes like some

change of life, some boiling wave

rising in me toward your body, toward

where it should have been on the seat, your

15

brow curved like a cereal bowl, your

eyes dark with massed crystals like the

magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the

delicate feelers of your limp hair,

floods of blood rising in my face as I

20

tried to reassemble the hot

gritty molecules in the car, to

make you appear like a holograph

on the back seat, pull you out of nothing

as I once did—but you were really gone,

25

the cab glossy as a slit caul out of

which you had slipped, the air glittering

electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.