Crabapples in the Century's Storm

You say that you've forgotten
 But I know that you're rotten in your sweet little way
 Like the crabapples
 Themselves like ornaments
 Fermented in the suspense
 Of their sweet decay
 Drinking Shell station wine beneath the Sylvan Lake willow
 My prophesied Rebecca on my bike trail and pillow
 I still see your cheeks so red in Pontiac summer
 The pulverized sidewalk and the racing and the stupor
 Or in danger, and the kids using a milk jug for a basketball
 I'd risk it all to ask it all, to bask the fall again in splendor
 Tracing your rotten spine
 Oh, but when you hair was still long
 Everything a new song and the heater and the theater
 Soiled tights and the nights
 Where we touched in standing darkness
 The odor was magnetic and we wore it like a harness
 My memory is freezing in your dead night winter attic
 Evacuated all except for the electric static
 Of our bodies sparking on the carpet and the mattress
 Something made a tar pit out of what was once a fortress
 Who can really say?
 Maybe I took that for granted
 But somehow my lips never left
 Where the back of your neck slanted
 Oh, my little wastrel
 My sweet lost friend
 My piss is in the tendrils
 Of your rented house ivy
 That ensnares the end
 Suspended there
 Like the crabapples
 Themselves like ornaments
 That's what you said one morning
 Looking out the back window of my parents'
 Weren't some mornings so fine?
 There inside that book I gave you
 Maybe there's a line you wrote to remind you or to save you
 Pretty "bois" sell shitty ploys
 But mark down all they're telling
 Catchphrases that vaporize
 Within ironic spelling
 But now the crabapples are in the century's storm
 The World Series is over
 And the world's collapsing in its form
 I think of all those young names that day on the stones we read
 Then cold Arizona Iced Tea when the cemetery scorched us red
 Now I am blind to your weekends
 The snorting kind of your new friends
 But there's a lot where Washtenaw ends that you might recall
 I know the way your body bends
 In the parked van where still impends
 The smoking frozen moment and
 The cataclysm of it all
 And I know your girlhood diary pens
 I read it back to you with tenderness
 Inside that summer bed
 Across your mother's hall
 Did I die inside the cleanse
 Of blinding-sun Lake Huron lens
 Where we were perfect?—that depends
 It's all just sand and squall
 Do you still hum when night descends?
 I thought it was your calmness then
 But it's your motor panicking
 With the animals trapped in your wall
 All the boys that you fucked over
 Eventually got out of Ann Arbor
 Honey, how come you're still stuck behind
 The counter?
 The streets we used to take
 The cracking of the lake
 I'll never get that final point you were barely even trying to make