HARD FORMULAS

Upon your silence, I come crashing.
I am lost salt and siphoned minerals,
I am your accident.
Let me take a light shaving from your bones,
a tangled grey snarl of hair.
I will taste something tonight of who I am.
I wish for the hard formulas binding me to you;
stitched red calligraphy, the spider-light of veins.
Let me touch the stem of iron still gleaming in you,
because I know I will find through this I am only
a deduction, a nub, a glistening sea-root that broke for air.
Inside, each of us carries a portion of the first ocean.
When you break, what will be left?
Only your scrubbed, grey shoals.
Only me, gripping like lichen to my own bones,
a scattering of rocks and calcium,
my blood running rich and dark as tar
to mark the lasting burn of your deposit.