If you have no voice after reading Rumi
    to a dying man you hardly know, this is
a good and timely thing. Pay attention.

If you’ve sworn to stay at the hospital
    for two days, end up staying ten, you
are the wind that rocks me forward.

There are lights in the city that never
    know an off-switch or what it is they
illumine. Be this, you beg old friends,

your voice still husked in rattle after
    the man’s body has been rolled out and
you’ve left the book of poetry for night-

shift nurses to dog-ear, after you’ve followed
    uncountable shoes across the salted
street, clamping onto the living

hands that let you feel two pulses meet.