Part Four
bodies
I am a liar, you circle me twice, I am about to tell you how guilty I am
I want you to be someone else, to tell me this desire is original
we cannot otherwise part, the flashing lights occasionally reveal the impressions I was born with
I'll cut to the quick: the lights are coming on and I'm afraid I won't love you then
the kiss
your ebony cats glide toward us in tandem— you part your hair and lean over me on my side of the bed
we kiss, but I'm almost afraid to touch you, the truth may speak itself unwittingly as I draw the sheet taut against the length of my body
touch
the body ferries your spirit, disconnected as a dream from its birthing place
the space beyond the womb is untenable, every moment accrues strangely into age as touch is slowly relieved from you
lament in three colors
when my heart becomes as vivid as your apples and geraniums you must promise to paint it— the north light will pour through the window into my palms, and be gone
light
the blinds divide the blue sun, your blond hairs glisten on your uncovered leg
light bends around us like fabric— at breakfast I explain: the peculiarities of light, our bodies mapped perfectly by chance
prediction
just over that dune, that's where you'll meet her, she'll have fair skin and will be sunning by the shore
the edge of the ocean will tangent the brim of her hat, you'll make some abstruse comment, how it flattens space and makes it appear she and the water are touching
twelve hours in the future
you drink sake and walk down white roads too small to contain your ambition
the moon is remote, drifting through the branches, the thing in itself unaware of the man yelling at it
surrender
The spilled wine spreads to the edge of my napkin
over the course of our dinner. After the second bottle,
I confess that my wife has thirteen ribs.
On the third bottle, we compare traumas.
The gay waiter interrupts
with the indifference of a Greek chorus:
'our most popular sin is the chocolate souffl'.
An hour later, my red napkin could pass
for a thin sheet of venison tartar.
The waiter pours two flutes of Kir Royal
then impatiently stacks the chairs behind us.
You lean back as if you were Isaac
anticipating his father's judgement
and we are both in that drunken, beatific state
that makes any room sacred.
one metaphor
twenty winters from now you'll still be divining profundities from copulation and I'll still be mining my family secrets for that one metaphor that will inexplicably explain my childhood
there's so little poetry in the reality that we can't write our failings into a good life, or be thankful our compulsions move us any closer toward truth
in Japan, a bird alights on a branch outside your window and inspires a hundred tankas or it simply wings over your house, unnoticed