Five Hundred Years
Nick Flynn

In
sleep our hands find each other. Outside

the street, paved with bottlecaps--yesterday
a parked car glistened, now--a mere scatter

of green shattered glass. You murmur

from a dream, I feel
night press on my chest, like the earth
tamping the dead back into earth. If we had five

hundred years to work this out,
if after all that time

we remembered, if we still cared, if we
had fingers to dig, if there were shovels,

we could find each other, blood
compressed to rubies, lungs to slate,

fingers gone yellow, blue leaking
from your eyes, my shoes, side-

by-side beneath the window
as if I had simply
disintegrated out of them, yours

toe-to-heel, as though you struggled.