...If love is an awkward, scriptless scene

To be played out between two people,

I cannot write it: I am a pattern

Of breath and sleep that city will outlive.

And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I too, was lost--
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.

East of that city, the green fields
Are winding away beneath your gaze,
And here, west of that city, there is
No water deep enough to let me forget...

-excerpted from the poem Departure by Joe Bolton