Bottle Curve

            This is what you remember: collision—

                        metal against metal, the way

the edges budged & how, lying there now,

            you want back to ‘93: to soft skin

                        & nights driving down dirt roads

            & the desire to still be—

                        breathing, you want to say,

but instead you think of all the things you wish

            she was not: white crosses where

                        the road curves, not the reason

            a man spends fifteen to twenty in Huntsville.

                        Now: you become each thing

he took away from you— bottles of Old Milwaukee

            at the County Fair, your ‘87 Ford speeding

                        down a highway. The repetition

            that won’t bring you a return— remember

                        the ghosts singing Hank Williams,

the answer to one impact begging to be another.

Self-Portrait as Q Source

Tell me: am I too distant

            from the shared narrative:

the mystery of stigmata, the child

in the desert. How do we trace

            past if I am lost: the memory

of synoptic bodies, our koine tongues

& the end, when I forgot how the words

            fit together. The failure of memory:

did we stand before Caiaphas? This

is what I’ve become: the misplaced speech

            of Son, quelle. This is the forgetting:

the way the words can’t connect back.