Sloughing

for Story

1.

–And after you, the seep:
a bloody comet’s tail, eight weeks,
arachnid crawl
of clots, the slow
retraction of a slackened core.
A self unrecognized, a shell
awash on foreign shores.

2.

Daughter,
you have made me something
akin to Lot’s wife: forewarned
to shuffle off
regret, to slough
the longing
for abandoned lands.

3.

Love is a dermis, earned
by the measured erosion
of ego, a molting of
parsimony, a flaking of
our sin. For you,
I will slough all
my skins; I love
beneath the bone.