My name is not my own
and you are lost in the sameness
of yours: marriage, divorce,
marriage, the name changed
like a billboard at the side of my life.

That day I saw you last
you were wearing a blue suit
in the mid-winter haze.
It was too big for you.
Your shoulders didn’t belong.
I heard you: “If you feel
the rightness of a thing, do it.”

Twelve years we’ve come
and not a word between us.
Last night you got off a bus
in my dream. Your body
seemed too small for itself. It was
hurt by something outside my sleep.
You took off your coat.
I could see the bones of your arms.
We didn’t mention it.
You asked for something ordinary
and wrong, vitamins, I think.

You had your camera on your chest
like a complicated doorknob.
You didn’t open.
My hands came back
to me. I was awake in that last café
where I did not say brother, where
I stood apart from your sorrow
in my great young indifference.

Tired lives had run you out.
You were going away. “Let them
have their bastard courage!”
Your hands came back
to you. You touched me, that hand
out of the grave. Early
and late, this hour has closed
around us.