We are in
bed, the dark is close to my face. Hilary
moans in the crib. It is getting
warm in here, the covers are
close, I am going
into it.
All the long-legged suns have clotted again
in my head, and only keyholes know a song.
Emptiness is my alibi, but it is pitted with syllables like
caterpillars moving hoarsely across the face of the Bible.
Outside, the rasp of a snow-shovel
grates in the dark.
Lovely
sound, I hang onto it. In the
stillness I feel the flakes and the heft of
that man’s left arm, and the sudden
twinge as the shovel lets go of the wet snow I am going into it
Many spaces no longer belong to the ones who once filled them.
The air keeps striding through.
Pinholes arrive & open like sprayguns, and always
the long-legged suns are combining.
Beside me on the bed the woman with whom I did
great violence for years, preserving
dalliance and stigmata, stretches
easy in her after-pleasure, sleeping.
Clothes and our wetness load the air.
Her hair is on my shoulder.
The covers lift and fold, and the shovel scrapes and I hear the
endless holes in the night hang down and the snow and our fragile breathing.