This One Doesn’t Get A Name I Just Miss You

For Frank. Always for you, unfortunately. “Because if you walk into a room and notice what is missing from it, / it’s still there, isn't it? / The first poem I wrote that wasn't about you / was still about you.”

If you cut your finger really bad in the kitchen
you can staunch the bleeding with cayenne powder.
Capsaicin, coagulation, vasoconstriction, tripartite too-big words
for healing. Contradiction; a burning salve. Like treeline against sunrise:
everything a silhouette, neon and the afterglow.
Whetted blades against the grey dawn, all except you—
your soft straw and the green, your chameleon eyes, the voice which,
in my mind, changes as I want it to. I make you amphibian and I miss you
in the snow. My cold-blooded killer. I call your blue veins forward
and slice you to the bone, stem the wound with agony,
a promise, a promise, this helps, this helps, this fixes you. It has to.
This time I will save you, my golden touch, the one you called a riddle
unwinding—some poems don’t need writing. Cayenne powder to the bleeding thumb.
Mars dust to your river water and an apology
flooding the burning banks: sometimes we make sacrifices.
Myth after myth, yes? Scamander, Midas, spice powder, you.
I tell you about the scene I invented, the one where you’re still alive
to bleed out in my kitchen. The one with your pulse, your breath,
your blood. Cayenne-red. Real and wet, and warm beneath my fingers.
It’s the pain which saves you. I promise. I’m sorry. I know it hurts.