how can she say that what she misses most
is not you and is not even
your hands or your mouth but instead is
her own ephemeral desire, so strict and focused
in proximity to your body and
amorphous in your absence, a teeming squad
of all the noises ever made in the bedroom
which circle the ceiling, tasting the air
and waiting for your invitation.
how can she say that what she misses is
not your action, but her reaction, all the ways
in which she understood herself
in comparison with or next to or while fighting with
you, the comfort of clarification.
to miss your body feels like a confession,
or an omission-- the crucial leaving-out of
secrecy, privacy, honor, in favor
of the brutal openness of absence.
here and now in her aloneness she still
can barely admit to the way she desires you,
would castrate herself for you, since the sex organs
like little bleating lambs can only
wander off and be preyed upon, now.