The Myth of Lovers on the Dirty Side of the Road

    I love you with doves
I pulled                from air. You inherit

a titanium galaxy & a ravenous appetite
for midnight’s diminishing

                                                         cords of dormant
black splendor, clove-hitched around each star.

               So you want to be an asterism?
Here’s a cored apple.       Touch your eye

             with the tunnel’s sweetest end & tell me
it isn’t a vintage telescope.              One day I will love you

            with something that isn’t pretending
to be something else.         Salome, Salome, & all that

                              loneliness. I’m sorry—
       this was supposed to be a birthday

party. I’m sorry I brought you to the broken
                        bridge instead.

             I didn’t expect the old Toyota
to suddenly lose its voice.       The gold part of

             the road isn’t always broken,
but there, over there, it is.        Color, cold fragments,

        against
                            all that flat inkblack.

We should have printed the directions, you say,
                             sitting on the gaps between the broken

gold in a way that makes it impossible to tell
                                           this line doesn’t run intact.