After You Left

I said fuck it and let another man name me his ship-

wreck; call my arms and legs masts

snapping apart in his wake.

For every piece I gave him, I demanded a secret

about the ocean. Outside my window,

an oak tossed its helicopters to the black roof.

He whispered: Listen. Something’s devouring the leaves.

Like this, he said, searching my mouth until I tasted salt.

Like this, his palms said, sinking to my hipbones

and the oak’s branches, swollen with wind, finished

their desperate scratching on the window.

Like this, he said again and again

and again his fingers forged riverbeds between mine,

and his breath came and went in the canals of my ear

like tides crossing each other, until all I could imagine

about ocean was that it once was still

water interrupted by something heavy

collapsing into it.