Springtime hearts on fire, running with a ragtime band through the humid cling of Alabama mornings in May, Needles dancing on your thigh the dance of Medusa in garter, or someone like her, Curled hair not quite serpents and space below for summer's dagger. I hold these memories close but they're just memories. She left, said your name was too close to mine, gold and amber halo cold and smoky like you had been. So goodbye to the vistas Goodbye to the year without a shadow, goodbye to the humid cling of Alabama mornings in May, I'll never see that state again without her to guide me down to the bars of Mobile, whose roots penetrate blood-soaked soil, and into mafiosi bars which serve that old poison in their fountains. How I wish to drink another cup, and to choose the wrong font, a liquid bruise spiked with sin, like the monolithic tie in my creosote nightmare, the awful symbol-thing which brought us together. We found each other in that shared fear and awe. You of death, which you knew too well, and mine of things inside which appear in dreams to impart holy raptures and obliterating terror, rape my kenning and depart for blood-gray marches while I hold my tatters close and sob in swarming revelation. All of this is to say that while I will never again hold your hand on the rails over Chickasaw, you meant something to me that was bright and vital. Your presence coursed like arterial water through a great grande-dam, so measured, so condensed, so powerful, so generative, so ancient. But dams are binds and you knew that about yourself and I guess I did too. Whippoorwills cried as you could-not or would-not while I stood in your paleness like a goddamn machine, Paralyzed as the curtains whispered down and your eyes shuttered into