Second draft.

HUSSAR

plump birches out
the window flush with cold,
clinging wet to white air.

autumn
home
I return
to the revelation of
rumpled satin:
your white thigh arachnoid
like viscid silk dripping
from the spinneret,
his chin dripping
against
your chest,
you dripping within him
like a spongy child.

my forehead throbs like a love-mad russian man;
my bootheels
should thump cannonlike
past the linoleum—
my hands
taut
murderous—
my chest:
crimson
starched
austere with wind—
the cylinder
a shriveled child
bulging at my ribs—

I should splinter
through the door
into the cold abysmal,
I should suck the sulfurous air
listening to the silence cleaving
to my brassy proclamation
(the trigger like a crushed,
chitinous body
clinging to my finger);
drip drip
racketing down my temple,
thinking of birches in the autumn rain.

you’ll sit
at the window,
his arm will
cup your hip.

I should rattle my saber,
a love-mad russian man.
but I left
my pelisse
in the car.

I bend to the kitchen floor
and pluck up the dead:
your jeans, shoes, red bra,
strewn like
propaganda leaflets
shouting
she isn’t yours.