Gone. Somewhere
on the #1 train
between the Bronx and Chelsea.

I shouldn’t have kept them
all in my wallet. Shouldn’t have fallen
asleep. You wouldn’t have

closed your eyes.
Your closed eyes.

Class pictures year after year.
Awkward stages with glasses and haircuts
and crooked parts
would make you cringe
if you could still move.

One of you and me,
my father must have taken.
In town to drive us to our junior high prom.

No dates. We were each other’s date.
Dresses the color of water
with ruffled scoop necks.

It had been only a year.
I should have paced myself.
I was too young
to fathom your absence.
You were way too young.

You were the one who understood
limits and functions.
I didn’t know how to wear the grief
turning inside out in the wind—
an electrical storm

that might erupt
at any moment. And you
would have already calculated
the joules of energy released
before the next thunderclap.

No thief can steal the symbol for infinity
we etched into the ice with our skates
on the Thornton Park rink.