Your hands and fingers are bells that ring
but one day they will not jingle inside me
like they have (countless times) before
and they will not ring like bells
but the grass will be mown by their sound.
The last sentence has been written before.
I throw it out there like everything else, my love.
This day I look upon the pack of horses,
observe the enchanting behinds that though and yet
are decorated
with tails
such fine ones
getting farther away from my house.
Which won’t be bigger than my house today, but more remote.
Like a lifetime. You know how that side of things goes, my love.
And I will miss the decorations in the back
but I won’t cry for help though you are one of the ones that leave.
When the direction is the sunset, the blessed direction is the sunset, what is one to do?
I won’t wait up.
I drape myself in a blanket and maybe the blanket gives me a tail.
A lucky, lovely tail when I wake up.
A tail that adorns that which opens and refuses to close.
Because, like safe-deposit boxes open and open and open
in the hands of thieves, thus am I.
I open and don’t close.
Thus are you.
You open and don’t close.
At this turning point I therefore grow a tail
for that which opens and completely refuses to close.
You remember where I read you this poem for the first time?
On the steps in front of the old factory in the sunset and you were drunk thinking of breaking up with me. (We had slept together a total of five nights, this is how good I am at counting.) With the poem I proved that I had known beforehand that you were thinking of breaking up with me. You gave it a name and opened my eyes to the literal and conservative arrogance of it. Best to keep the literal and conservative arrogance going a little longer:
The morning that you and the horses desert me
you spend under their protection and brush and brush your hair.
Secretly monitor my eyes that overtly monitor you
and your much, much brushed hair.
While the ponytails of the horses scythe the dark green grass.
Then you leave. The direction is the sunset.
And I have to try everything in order to wake up
and draw forth from my reticule
bells
that will ring in your ears your journey to its end.