I don’t
mourn you the way
I used to,
I don’t
smell the same eleven oclock
lawns of those same
scattered houses,
their windows
like the bulky spill
of your foreign breasts—
their scuffed paint fluttering
in the sprinklers’ luminous chaff.
from osgood
came the sound of a train
clobbering the distance,
and you stretched your incandescent throat
from which
I’d so often drunk
as though thumbing open
a can of stars,
knowing that
its effervescent parts
were dead
before they reached my mouth.
your body once,
I think,
was lean,
and hot as horse’s muscle.
I am certain of the way you moved,
your breasts like extrusions of fire.
today I saw you sitting in the sprinklers
at dawn,
the yellow light invading
your flabby peignoir.
the water on your gray face
filled the canyons and coulees,
and laved the skin red, foal-new.
I could tell then
you were pretty once,
with a sharp little nose and
eyes like
two dark little jockeys,
the taste of your skin
like the smell
of wet cedar.
your phone rang and you answered it.
you spoke for a long time
and did not see
the shadowy shards of concrete,
disjuncted boxcars,
the gnarled silhouettes of cranes,
like stooped
Camels.
And behind:
the black ranks of mountains, dark scaffold of nightmare.
advancing
across
the pearly bay
and my oily heart,
singing the
old world’s
iron hymn.
the wet mouth I
could not discern
whether rain
rolling berry-like
into me or
your sugary lather
on my flesh.
nor differentiate
my red thighs
and the grass
curling soppy and jewel-like
around me, which
blood-thundering limb
yours or mine;
the long love-clustered bough
booming
with the deep sap-thrush,
bursting in the loam,
and the sound of wild sighs.
I let you have the window seat even
though
you know
how much I like the view
this time of day.
and
your head obscures
the firm rolling breast of the bay.
as we pass the place
you used to live
the light
on your face
is like a blue cluster of birds
shredding the ground
for seed;
I watch you
unearthed in short stabs,
the green bulbs
of my planting scattered
and devoured.
look at the light on those buildings
you say.
like they’re on fire.
beyond your porchlight’s
dull peel
I hunch
by your jade’s
white clumps
where the rain
claws out
the furious scents.
even if
beneath the birch
you clung
to me in the clinging
of your wet garb,
you would not feel
the funnel of cool water,
your breasts the aqueduct
to the navel’s
velvet curl—
you would not see
the buds breaking
their green crusts
in the dark—
not the moist flock
of droplets
in my hair;
the spicy loam.
only
the clinging
of the wet garb,
your clothes informing
your body of its shape.
