I pay more attention to bathroom stall graffiti than I should,
as if hoping the inked consonants will reassemble
to form your name. If only someone had invented a way
to wear memory like a fashionable set of overalls,
I might never take it off. When the trees drop yellow and red
leaves like golden earrings, I remember
how you used to call each one a love note to the ground.
If poems are always brutally honest, then this one
is bloodthirsty to have you back again.
But poems cannot wake the dead;
they only shake their sleeping shoulders
and let them burrow deeper into bed.