Dear blind prophets, dear halos drawn around Byzantine saints, dear apologies, dear methods, dear sacrifices on bed frame, on dining table, on the wall the light touches last, dear shallowest parts of the river, dear wanderers of bright complicit dangers, dear sable nights, dear atoms of us, dear foals bearing their first lung in the old wood, dear parents, dear brother and sister dear to the broken parents, dear what-got-us-here, dear what-makes-us-remain, dear— I had to sit up for this— dear leaving, I had to waste every future where we  were  still  a family in the fire with which I love, dear phones ringing around the smoke-cleared room, dear sighs at the ends of messages meaning I don’t know what I did, dear deeper, dear instinct somewhere, dear sick willow dropping each yellow leaf to the same wind, dear caller, you have what I want, dear islands in anchor-blue water, dear lion at the resurrection, dear not-giving-up, though we are so far away from each other, though what we had wasn’t a love but a trick the eye plays on strangers. Though we danced we found the music hard. What I cannot say is how before the sighs come I can tell they will come, like the one errant hoof the horse makes a show of when shaking off the flies. Dear flies in every version of hell, dear rope around my waist holding me to the mast, dear fly-dark storm I can tell you approach, dear approach, be done with it— I shouted along the deck for all the sails to be drawn, I took down the laundry of me from where you might hit first, and now I am waiting. Now I wait axed as ever.