The Long Marriage
If it is true that I, you, don't exist but we are in it
for the eternity, for the once
in the pink-orange blazing dawn I put on
your black underwear.
Doing there, in my drawer,
stunned/pleased at the hip-fit,
years to a bus you jumped out of
in your duct-taped boots (there was snow),
you were so happy to be coming to see me
I saw you from the window's
vectored frost, a brown feathery
hen, here to roost, though you
were the male. Now the white birch drifts
a thousand motes back into the house
to eat off our dust and fly.
We sire and wench, harmony and ash
until conversation, consumption,
interrogation, and the small back of the sweet talk
become so paradisical, primitive, warped
I fall into the lace of your gutter,
pretty nice there,
and we have to wire prose into the talk to get the poem,
to get the rope that runs long and free
out the cave. Mastodon-like to crawl on all fours to birth
some intelligibles.
Got a grease fire in the kitchen for a long time coming.
Couples forming a rustling seriality
up city hall's granite steps'
nightlong cormorant moon, 20 pairs of black underwear in a superbag
be-lit with break
of dawn's exalt
as when media hyper-glosses our lives but not as bad
as your mom and dad, and we think of
our dreams with their heterodoxy and did I tell you mine or dream it
the lava-like tar
congealing into blue-black bubbles in asphalt
we could pop with each step.
Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen in the movie of our first
date both so young all they could do was kick thoughtlessly at the dirt
and kill everyone in their wake
but us. Spacek's short shorts her child-like, almost woman-like
legs. Sheen's cigarette pack folded back into the sleeve of his T-shirt,
we rose/stumble/found each
other's hands up the aisle pitch dark
and stood before the turn lights
turning jade green water. If anoint is a drop of oil
on our foreheads, if one by one alteration finds,
we toss our hair down a tower
for longer arousal. We want to be seen in the eyes of the government.
If marriage is Empire's locket
we get in bed like students to its sheets
though we hate the acquisition and the light moves.
How many instances of unity feel more like
bicycles attached to cars.
But that was your dream.
I get on the bus going nowhere in particular,
sit in sun for the warm.
The bus heaves sideways before lurching
down our street crowded (it is Wednesday) with the Episcopalian's
AA meeting's
cars, each shining, obediently
parked. Luck, its inexact clarity.
Soft as tracing paper the house lay
loose linoleum,
carpet, tile and oak for surfaces
to pace, parse, backtrack.
If this is the hallway
where a savage tiger with stitches mends itself and runs.
We cannot occupy it absolutely, ion, eon.
If this is the vertigo of another.
One song alone, one spinet,
many breezes, firmament, and water.
The psalm and plasm in the particulars
of the jungle where we walk to see it snow.
If we are so angry
If we are so happy.
If no eye contact. The wind tears hard at it.
