Though we occupied our regular seats, the tolling
of the tower’s hand unlit the skylight’s blue: night sky
before the shade. Two feet away
the thickened bones of the street. The soaring
traffic sung very badly to prove we owned some part in it.
Across, he, who was tossing earlier, hurled into the talk,
the talk, the talk, and what?
about the starving … Give
nothing? All of you, your kind, hold your doubts: on thinking
back, on truth, on distribution, the famine, the drought.
On the linoleum floor,
prefixed, I detach myself. Stir out of solution
to the next place, just below. Un
generous, holding
the tongue. To sense like scent his uneven equation, the width
of the gustatory taste bud and some small mouth, 100,000
nanometers empty. In the same eye the linoleum we occupy,
square
after square.
And easy it is, the wording of, Can’t grasp. Not there. Inherent
indeterminacy. And the nodding. Smuggled from: Safeway.
Sanguine.
Stalemate. But I have stood within. A hunger sinking
into. Nothing stops. And the feeling: Bound
less. Could say: A hand. Could say: Needed. Close in
on humanistic regard. Then the waiter wanted.
We ordered two two-lb. snappers.
The very elite, the very fine, most costly sent
four one-lb. snappers. Ragged bottom to our rushing hunger
without vision of the casting down.
Even today, after,
coldness in the flesh wakes the loneliness of him,
calls such contorts of want to his gut—
the thrust, a block of ice too thick to be, yet dragging up
within man’s desire to look around, to know physically
she will touch him, she will turn toward, wake up into
from her own herculean expression of sadness.
(At last, then, are all the ways the hands stay involved:
weightless, lost word of love on the hardening nipple,
unburdened between the thighs as touch echoes, after all,
you. His hand urging out of her deep surrender what
on its own could not. How he holds her holds him down.
(All the way through it is finally, then, that fear in the breath
of the breath swept out, lost to dawn, loosened
by the other’s sleeping arms, bodies adrift
until the space between them asks, How wide this?
A turned ankle is its own consequence. She hops about, then caught on the sofa waiting for the swelling to go down is reminded we move among others to fall from ourselves, windswept, having a liking for laughter but the ridiculousness of falling off one’s own heels. What was being viewed from up there? The mind varies so, then the tripping up; for the foot, not steadiness, is at the same time as the mind running about in downpour. Outside the bathroom, moments before, having just pulled her panty and his underpants out from where the lump detracted from tightly tucked bedsheets, she, in that place which proves as she holds in her hands the closest mingling of them, scent sweetly wading across the mouth of love, comes about in this remembering and is reminded, the ankle throbbing, lying there. And so, knowing again remarkably, after all, you, she, finding the glass of water between the legs of the sofa, is moved to respond like any woman collecting rainwater to stay alive.
Nearer the open hydrants of summer to arrive flung. sung. sweat
stains tossed aside: all effort
past forgotten:
tension of whether forgiven
as the unclothed if disciplined body releases as it wraps its
legs around: closure rewarding and sustained and thigh-high.
Don’t ask to be told x to y in time or eternity.
Passage bleeds between the hammering
breath and flesh. Sweetness mumbled