We’ve been to see a movie, a rotten one
that cost four dollars, and now we slip
in a cheap car along expensive streets
through a night broken open like a stalk
and offering up a sticky, essential darkness,
just as the terrible thing inside of me,
the thick green vein of desire or whatever it was,
is broken and I can rest.
Maybe in another place and time, people
drive slowly past the taverns
with black revolvers reaching from their windows,
but here in the part of night where every
breath is a gift tremendous as the sea,
thousands of oleanders wave
blossoms like virgins after a war.
I can hear my own scared laughter coming back
from desolate rooms where the light-bulbs
lunge above the radios all night,
and I apologize now to those
rooms for having lived in them. Things
staggered sideways a while. Suddenly
I’m stretched enough to call certain of my days
the old days, remembering how we burned
to hear of the destruction of the world,