Today I memorize your heartbeat line by line.
You once got a tattoo of the spikes of breath that show up
on a breathing machine in the hospital, on your forearm
above the tiny red birthmark that looked like the blood
of a grapefruit shot with a handgun. I once read
about an elderly man who used to call up complete strangers
every day before his death, and talked about things
like their favorite type of pizza, their never-ending loneliness,
or the rise and fall of the stock market. He did this
for four years straight, and informed the local newspaper
that the best calls he ever made
were the ones in which no one spoke.
Just breath on the other end.
And tonight I remember how I used to measure
all the space I spent without you in the distance
between our fingertips, until one day you left me
for some other woman, and I went to bed
remembering that you were 450 finger-lengths away.
I didn’t know yet that you would come back to me
again, and leave me three more times
before the year was over, and all I’d be left with
was the voicemails I made
of you breathing down my phone line.