After years of secret glances,
I knew it well – a cage of slanted
wires arranged on a Doric column
in my grandparents’ living room.

Spring cleaning in Baltimore always involved
a yellow bucket sloshing with soapy water
and a rag recognized as the tattered remains
of my father’s bowling shirt, circa 1973.

Receding hairline, your rented room
in the wooded hills beyond light
pollution and suburbia, your penchant
for slender women with large eyes
and small breasts, talent for language

Talk and you wonder if that could be a voice.
And you lie lightly, skimming the cream
of sleep off the top of an endless night. 

He said, “We do not love by word alone,”
And pulled the silence down around his voice
As though a sound could hurt him. Since those words
Became their own perverse, inviting promise,
She had to smile: “Then what is left to say
That you will listen to, except a kiss?”

It’s a vocabulary of old country
songs, unfaithful women
and open roads, a scratchy
vinyl itching in her thighs.
This fear of swimming pools
and gas station bathrooms. 

This tiny thing breathing between us that aches something awful.
By summer, I am slipping all the complimentary mints in my coat pockets
while you pay the check. Gripping the railings on bridges to keep
diving over. Some dark dog in my throat when I say hello.

In the deep fall, the body awakes,
And we find lions on the sea-shore–
Nothing to fear.
The wind rises, the water is born,
Spreading white tomb clothes on a rocky shore,
Drawing us up
From the bed of the land.

And the wind is the moan of the prairie
That haunts and bedevils the plains
The soul stealin’ kind that can fray a man’s mind
Till only his whimper remains

He was every burnt out cowboy that I’d seen a million times
With dead man penny eyes, like tarnished brass,
That reflected accusations of his critics and his crimes
And drowned them in the bottom of a glass.

Must I anger and must my anger pearl,
My anger pearl, must I pearl, must I polish
Madness daily, rub nacre into a world
Perfect, round, what in my hand should finish

Record no oiled tongue, diary–
Note my lantern bruises the low
Clouds with light the evening
We talked. Almonds in a bowl;
She ate none. I did
Not bid her remove her dark
Gloves as sometime before she had done.