Reading the Waterfall

Those pages he turned down in peaks
at the corners are kerchiefs now, tied
to the last light of each favorite tree
where he paused, marking my path
as surely as if he’d ordered squads
of birds to rustle leaves overhead, and
I do look up often, musing into
his warmed-over nests or letting
a thrum of recognition pulsate koto-like
as it his head were over my shoulder
in a cool fog allowed to think its way
down a marble staircase shorn of its
footfalls. In a child’s crude pea-pod
canoe my amber beads float seaward
like a cargo meant to be lost. How often
I am held alive by half a matchstick,
remembering his voice across rooms and going when called to hear some line
of poetry read aloud in our two-minded way
like adding a wing for ballast and
discovering flight. So much of love
is curved there where his pen bracketed
the couplet mid-page, that my unused
trousseau seems to beckon deeply
like a forehead pressed into paradox
by too much invitation. He lets me dress
hurriedly for the journey as a way to better
leave me what vanishes according to
its readiness, as he is ready and glides now
into my long bedside Sunday
until we are like the dead pouring water
for the dead, unaware that our slender thirst
is unquenchable.