As if I craved error, as if love were ahistorical,
I came to live in a country not at first my own
and here came to love a man not stopped by reticence.
And because it seemed right
love of this man would look like freedom,
the lone expanse of his back
would be found land, I turned,
as a brown field turns, suddenly grown green,
for this was the marriage waited for: the man
desiring as I, movement toward mindful and yet.
It was June, brilliant. The sun higher than God.
In this bed, a man on his back, his eyes graying blue.
It is hurricane season. Sparrows flying in, out the wind.
His lips receiving. He is a shore. The Atlantic rushing.
Clouds opening in the late June storm. This,
as before, in the embrace that takes all my heart.
Imagine his unshaven face, his untrimmed nails, as all
the hurt this world could give.
Gnaw. Zigzag. The end of the alphabet buckling floors.
How to come up?
The blue-crown motmot cannot negotiate narrow branches,
but then her wings give way, betray struggle,
intention broken off in puffy cumulus.
I wished him inside again.
Touched him. Feathery
was the refusal,
drawing together what thirsts. His whole self holding me in,
we slept on the edge of overrunning
with parakeets nesting
in porch lights and dying hibiscus covering the ground.
(a dry season choked in dust, etched cracks in dirt roads,
children down from the hills in the sweat of night
to steal water.
Plastic containers in those hands,
over the gate to my house. I lie here, my head
on the prime minister’s belly, listening: urgency
swallowed by worried stillness
enveloped again by movement, before, finally,
the outside tap turns tentatively on—
Lower the lids and the mind swims out into
what is not madness, and still the body
feels small
against such flooding hurled through the dull and certain dawn.
You, you are defeat composed.
The atmosphere crippled brings you to your knees. You are
again where we find ourselves dragged.
Your hand, that vagary in shadow.
So soon you were distanced from error. Nakedness
boiled down to gray days: hair in the drain, dead skin
dunning shower water. The morning cannot
be picked through, not be sorted out. Clearly, you know,