Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring 
that's landed on your finger, a massive insect 

of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. 
Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt under the blanket

of your voice, said I guess there's two kinds of women.
those you write poems about and those you don't. 

It's true. I never slid sonnets under the door, or served you
haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping 

Jane's Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window 
at three hundred A.M., whiskey doing push-ups 

on my breath. I worked within the confines of my character, 
cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan

of your dark side. We don't have a past so much as a bunch 
of electricity, power never put to good use. What 

we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if 
we caught one another like a flu, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup  and lots of sex. 
Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Ben Franklin 

of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, haven't developed antibodies 

for your smile. I don't know how long regret existed 
before humans hammered a word on it, or how many 

paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, 
or why the light of a candle being blown out 

travels faster than the luminescence of one that's freshly lit,
but I do know all our huffing and puffing

into the other's throat—as if the heart was a birthday cake
covered with trick candles—didn’t make the silence

any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses I scribbled 
on your neck were written in disappearing ink, sorry

this poem took thirteen years to reach you. Sometimes 
I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear, and when I slept, you'd press your face 
against the porthole of my submarine. I wish that just once,

instead of joyriding over flesh, we'd put our hands away 
like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered 

the calligraphy of each other's eyelashes, translated 
a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn't be said.