You did the Hippy-Hippy Shake.
I messed with Mr. In-Between.
Tonight you’ll hit the first three chords
of “Crazy” and a thousand tiny
lights will make you half-believe
the sky has fallen at your feet.
I’ll watch a documentary
about the life of Cary Grant,
then take a bath and go to bed.

You’ll blunt the come-down with some sweet
brown sugar in a five-star suite
and wake from the recurring dream
in which your third wife fucks the pool-boy,
and see, across the bed,
a tattoo stallion on the shoulder
of a girl your daughter’s age
and hope she’ll keep on faking sleep
until you’re halfway to a strong
black coffee and a cigarette
in Mother Mary’s Bar ‘n’ Grill.

I’ll read the Sunday magazines
and find you bathing in that pop
and glare of being seen you’ve lived with
all your life, which burns and bleaches
everything until the route you took
and everyone you left behind
have turned to vapour trail and backdrop.

Did it have to be like this,
the future like a fault in flint
it took a hammer-blow to find?
Did you feel a different North
and peel away? Or was your gift
to slip the leash of every story
that we told ourselves to mend
the absence that you left behind?

This, for what it’s worth, is mine:
I passed the bottle which said Drink Me,
but you drank, and grew and grew
until the town, your family
and friends were all too small for you.
And by the summer you were gone.

I wake some nights at 5 a.m.
and, shuffling to the window, see
a figure standing on the gravel
just outside the porchlight’s range
and wonder what it is you want,
to mock me, or make amends?
To come inside, or take my hand
and lead me to a black Mercedes
purring on the hill? To get
some measure of how many miles
you’ve put between us, or how few?

I feel the tug of gravity
which everyone who knows you feels,
but turn and potter back to bed
and melt into that larger dark
where you will always orbit, far out,
lord of heart and oceans, lit
by sunlight borrowed from the far side
of the world, bright satellite
to this fixed earth, my counterweight,
my twin, my necessary ghost.