Your Way Out is Through the Garden

seventeen years we went before I knew your friends names you barely know now and you kept them absent from me as you keep yourself still, so leave stay cradle-tucked away as a soothing, sour breast pocket letter I wrote a long time ago and you kept it as close as your friends, in a sense I know you; you want me as whiskey going down easy making you fuzzy, spitting skins of salted sunflower seeds th-pping-th-pping— flooding the green-glass ashtray on our mantel; you gave up smoking long ago but held onto the equipment like a heavy, hoard of breath waiting to be used again for anything other than spat nutlets of the pith leftover, stripped from our heads of picked-at stems, sneeze-weeds from our backyard horticulture I see you :: you want me to forget that bit too? I saw it through the garden, you leaving the path, seething steps' impressions follow you—though first paired depressions, the imprints as all after them, stay in placating place until the next rain glazing the brown, composting ground of stage melting your trespass into the foreground, back at level-set ready for another sprouting or the last grasping seizure of breath from a neck stretching to see over the gate looking for a new path on the way out