Each night you ask about the view
from my window: the rusty U.S. Steel building
with honeycombs of thick, spreadable light,
the river wind-creased to a single
brown shudder, whose bottomless sucking
and drawing terrifies you, as love does.
Me it liberates. The river, I mean.
I know the roll of those dark wet hips
can bring a rich commotion to the numbest fields.
I tell you I woke to a blizzard today,
and thought at first I was in hospital,
the windows were so abracadabra white,
and how under hypnosis once I remembered
waking on my mother’s chest in a white room.
But I tell you many views late at night,
by telephone’s filamental grace, by the wire
between the two tin cans of our hearts.
Still, you will not come over. The river, you see.
The shadow egrets flying low
over fluorescent water, with glitter knives
and tense ambiguous wings.