Thimphu, violence entered our love like counterfeit coins across borders

Otherwise average snowless
Thimphu winter. We came closer
drinking coffee in a joint in Clocktower Square.
Her voice is like the taste of perfectly
brewed coffee, I told my friend.
I don’t think other combinations
were possible.
The first warmth we shared was under
a neon Buddha, almost guilty
of what we did.
And that’s how
it all led toward
eventuality with the unrelenting inevitability of days

and we didn’t see
the happier spring together. We had four
languages between us but not each other’s. We said
love wasn’t possible in languages
foreign to us both.

We said our goodbyes, and we
stayed. But there is always the last
one that breaks the bench. We walked
out like ghosts from our childhood.
We were
in each other’s debt for mornings wasted
nursing the anguish of our shared bodies
and secrets issued as
now-uncallable bonds.

We inhibited the same city
and the streets and the same
different beds but the unravelling
came quickly with a startle. First in
my coffee. I smoked long cheroots rolled
in cornhusk to augment the burn-smooth
taste of coffee. My father went
to the back of a hospital in Samtse
to smoke his cornhusk cheroot with me
in the Ortho ward, a seven-year-old,
arm in a sling, and
and a now-forever equestrian fear,
and that night he slept
like a dead man in a rust-eaten
hospital chair, his arm
plaster older than mine,
hanging down his side.

Sometimes she
called me. To tell
me snows half-destroyed
the poinsettia we jointly owned.
The last thing ours. And that ceased too,
allowing distance to grow
like weeds in an abandoned yard.
It grew in time because we couldn’t stretch out our city.
One year, two,
and then so vast. Merely thinking about her
I became an astronomer
poring through vast distances that broke
down our agreed semantics
wondering if someone is repeating the ritual
at the faintest radio signal
thrumming on an antenna
of a spare heart.