in love as in tourism

cartography seems the strangest science today

as morning alters the fittings of the hour to form

shapes wholly new. wishing I did not know that, to leave,

it is down and right past the neighbor’s potted palm,

across the street to meet the river, then ahead until

the train station crowds into view—I search the infinity

enclosed here, for any time that the future could spare.

between the words lost and losing entire worlds change

hands. where the latter informs negation the other is

duplicitous with potentialities—becoming something

even desired. suddenly one is alert to all the colors

returned to sight by merely looking, a lack of familiarity

striking the common into curiosity, just as in the folktales

in which death plays detective, the wanderer is the one

who evades the blade. it is so wonderful to not be found

but to be finding, as I discover in tokyo—whose streets

resemble labyrinth, pierced with rhododendron in spring

and thundering gingko in autumn—and remember again

when you laugh and I do not ask why. and I do not want

to know either, to whom this room belonged to before us,

or where that smell of fruit is coming from, or why a fog

rises to challenge the knowledge of places once intimately

kept. I am grateful that within you only the unknown lives,

that even as what passes between us is frail and limited

and human, we still dream of things resembling the eternal.