The night before her third marriage,
she arranges flowers, watches reruns:
he forgets “Heartbreak Hotel”—clutches
his throat. “Worst job I’ve ever done,”
he says. She loves his failure like she loves
her own skin. She loves his fear,
his one-of-a-kind black leather jumpsuit
over it. She loves whatever protection
there is. Elvis reads his cues
aloud: “Things to talk about”—First
record, when first met musicians,
Ed Sullivan Show, shooting from waist up.
Pulls his finger over his curling lip.
While he has her laughing, he’s gradually
relaxing away from the past, toward
where he is now, the stool he’s sitting on.
He’s closing his eyes, going on
with the songs, courting the front row.
She watches for the moment now,
knowing, from the future, how backstage
after the first set, he called
the costume designer to dry out
the inside of his suit, which he had come in.
She wouldn’t want to say how hard she’s
watching to see the moment of coming.
He jabs his hand straight up, shouts
“Moby Dick!” and spears the whale. Now.
Or when he leans into the girl’s face as if
she already planned to leave him,
so he sends her all he has. It would be
something, to catch what was missed before,
to get in sync with him. It would make
a kind of opening between them, through which
you could fill the past with shaken blossoms.