KEVIN PRUFER
Wish the lights would go back on, wish it was spring already.
Wish the bees would fly back home from my living room.
Hear them singing and horsing around in there? Rattle, rattle
against the porcelain, fire screen, window panes, their unfeeble buzz
rising to racket-level till one by one the portraits fall from the walls.
They enjoy the glow the space heater provides.
When we moved in here—my young wife and I—the place was merely
tumble-down: chips in the walls, blackened floors, and leaves spreading,
fan-like,
from the cracks beneath the doors. We unloaded the bed first.
I said, “We’ll consummate things here—and here, and here,” pointing
first to that bed, and then to the leafswept places. She stood in the kitchen
unloading the flatware. One by one, her forks tumbled to the floor.
I was terribly in love, but it wasn’t long
before she shuddered at my breath on her neck. She is a woman
of great distractions and hairpins. I swept the leaves from the doorways
and her laughs came as blackish clouds, her words snowdots or beetles,
depending.
Sometimes I wouldn’t see her all day, so busy was she
singing to herself in the gardens behind the house. I swept and swept,
cleaned the pipes, caulked the walls as best I could.
Then it was November and the ice thickened
in invisible leaks in the bricks. When the winds came, the trees shook
their twig-tips until the windows cracked. The bees arrived later,
sensing, somehow, the house an escape from the cold.
Wish they were gone. Wish I had something to clot the walls.
My wife, in her bedrobe, drew an invisible line
at the foot of the stairs. “Here is for you,” she told me, sweeping
the downstairs with her hand. Now she lives in the master chamber
at the top of the stairs. All day, behind the bees, I hear
ice cracking in those leaky veins. The bricks fall, startlingly,
into the yard. Sometimes I hear her slippers skipping over my head.
She sings to herself and moves the bed around. Is she tying
a great escape from the bed sheets? Does she scale
the rose trellises at night? And for whom? My poor skin
is brailled over with stings. I wish the spring storms would come.
Wish the gardens would bloom, thorn over the path to the road.
Wish there was something I could say.