A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. / The grammar turned and attacked me. / Themes, written under duress. / Emptiness of the notations. // They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds. // I want you to see this before I leave: / the experience of repetition as death / the failure of criticism to locate the pain / the poster in the bus that said: / my bleeding is under control. // A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths. // A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor. / These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight. / when I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time. / When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. / I could say: those mountains have a meaning / but further than that I could not say. // To do something very common, in my own way.