You are a detached retina.
I’ve taken up wearing a coonskin hat,
searching out fried chicken.
There is something about blindness
that makes me want to cradle your bones
after you die. But I’m afraid

geography makes no sense.
Each place becomes a way to remember
leaving you: the living room,
Cincinnati, Kingston, anyone’s funeral,
a church service the week after Easter.
Anything less would be a hostile takeover.

Anything more would be the world trapped
in the crook of my elbow. There are no maps
to trace, to angle ourselves against sunsets
and the moon lumbering into flatness.
Somewhere in New Mexico or Costa Rica
you caught rain in that blind eye,

and I watched it pool over, turn
into the Amazon River, lonely, with no natives.
I drank from it, your glazed iris stuck
against eyelid, the clearness of water
something to remember, to stretch
across tongue, across each rock we kept

buried in the backyard: the wars we had
no treaty for, the graves we always assumed.