"True Feeling Leaves No Memory"

The havoc of your gaze is tidy now;
The slow heat of your shoulder cooled long since.
Yet once the air bristled at the approach
Of so much as your finger to my elbow.
Memory leaves me no more than a flash
Of full moon glinting on unfrozen river.

Along the rolling pathway of my time
I can number the grassblades and the bittersweet,
Though whole meadows are missing from the calendar.
I touch my finger to distorted roots
And track their features to a severed stump
That stops itself far short of boughs of zero.
What woodsman crept up with his silent saw
To cut this alteration on my landscape?
He finished off with cold purgative fire
To eat the tender wood, the loving leaves
That whispered once against themselves like thighs.

Returning now, I walk through open reaches
Naked to all, where I must once have lain
As warm as a rabbit’s beating heart
In a thicket sprinkled with morning, where each leaf
Burned green, hot as a newly minted coin.