ALT ON DISSOCIATION   after Marie Howe It is for this I leave you: endless February behind my last apartment, another city, the fickle snow sticking, for once, dead finch cemented to the ice beside the Honda; my old love harrowing the trash in search of a ginkgo leaf I picked one afternoon, tattered now between its filaments like a chapel window blasted in the siege— or the jaundiced, abstract August after leaving, when he crashed his bike and shredded half his thigh, woke bloody in the street, remembered nothing of that week, just said he hadn’t meant to scare me— or the dream I have one night a week at least, where the kitten I abandoned to the shelter is still mine, though I’m still me, the place vacant for years, just scattered litter, a blanket nest. I turn the key. The empty foyer chokes on dark and fumes, and though she doesn’t gambol up, I feel the air displaced, her shallow breath. She is like so much was back then: alive,

ALT but only just. Too late to run, I pick my way along the wall toward her black tongue, distended belly, what I’ve done. Outside, the oak trees cinch black mesh around the orange moon. How to explain that ever since, all real events, even pleasure, are a long concert I am being subjected to? You turn me so I’m face down on the bed. The dark thrusts in again, in time with you. My old love throws the kitten above his head and catches her, ignoring her thin protestations, the brutal weather of that time and place flying and falling softly in his arms. My eyes adapt to the dark as though the dark were an animal, afraid of me at first, and then approaching to sniff my outstretched palm.

ALT INTROCEPTIVE BUFFER SATURATION How do you experience time? I’ll go first. While reading, I lose an eyelash at the end of a poem. The black fiber clings like a hoofprint to the mountain. Little comma, pausing, apostrophe in a hurry. I love the way it looks, alone in the white expanse. I turn the page without brushing it away. Fifty years from now, I abandon my robot child in a forest. When I turn back, the eyelash is reborn, the animal of the fossil. Yesterday, Andrew said indifference means living in the now. When you don’t care what happens, you relinquish the future. I can only intimate to him everything my body has forgotten. Power surges fry the boiler. Cold bleaches the street. The moon rises early and ends the day by accident. What Andrew said is true, I mean neurologically. Being indifferent, to the body, is a continuous present. On my fingertip, the eyelash is being a small, empty bowl. On a craggy rock, three hungry goats are mostly staying still.