I say it not for the sack. The booze willed me,
but did not capture my heart, only reversed it,
and those clear moments with you, just before
breaking, when I weeped, voice thin as wire on a ranch
in the west, where we never visited once, too lost!
Voice open and unsure of any live thing in the desert.
On that couch, in that sickness, did I know
it would come back to us, my heart. Because
the backwards way I learned to tie my shoes and set North
somehow didn't send me into nowhere, stumbling around
in the dark-- but in the middle of the day, or a blind man sailing
a ship with a broken compass. It wouldn't have mattered
to that man, which appears as me. I had to learn to walk
again, to learn the directions of the stars again,
to find my way back to you, that life of me, of I, of we.
