We see our ending as bonfire-light:
wind-tossed, sputtering, smoky.
She moves away, an angst
trailing behind: a wake of breadcrumbs,
a train of ripped-apart roses,
plucked like poultry
of each perfect petal
to prepare to make love or make up —
or either, scattered over a bed, left
with frantic fingers digging frenetic and still
glued to underground desires; high or wired,
I am trying to make low slopes of flowers
to bridge the dark corners of my sleep.
I argue my admiration and repeat
the exhausted answers you seek
in the omens of the morning.
You will know me then, when
each of your senses will flicker,
placed under gray cotton,
beneath pieces of the eternal,
below the heat of hunted bearskin
and the heavy humor of this world.
-
We vote with disengaged
incentives, travelers already
and living as movements
of water across the sides
of fluted glasses, living
without anyone, without
the thought of withstanding
the artificial /
this immortality of bones
/ the last sip of whisky.
-
We kiss. Or else
he waves
as mandolins murmur
what he saw
on that September afternoon
beside the library’s ivory door,
behind the veil of the unforgiven,
inside the large park
where our talking
led my friend to think
suddenly
that a substance would fall into us,
right there,
sky-birthed and screaming.
He said it would
crash through our bodies,
plunge into liquid composition
with sick splash — and it
would smash straight into our
ideas of things; into
our bad decisions; into how
far we bended, broke, or gave.
It will show us the shape
of our graves.
He said it would ignite
within our chest, doused
in a fuel no illusion can replace,
housed in bone, clay, and glass —
a fire to warm
a marrow deeper than marrow,
a light alive
with a dreaming
according to urging
and the intrusion of a torch
into inkblot evening.
-
I lie by the water. I hammock
my fingers to hold the stream;
I drink deep.
So here, you found me.
Tonight,
I hide neither from you
nor the anxious tics of clockhands.
-
I realized the other night
when you prayed
that this indescribable
glow moved into me:
it grew. It danced until
I knew I held a sun in my belly
hot as August rocks
in a snakeskin-littered riverbed,
a place too dry for tears,
too dry now to think of
the cool vanity of direction.
Each evening, I lay out plates.
I bake that space our hands
made between our palms
when we braided our fingers
together. I mine it from
memory like soggy
clay. I shape it into vases
to fill with flowers
your mother would have just
tossed away.
I set the table.
I wait.