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Rained for three months under porticoes of memory umbilical rain columns of cells in thick migration suspended state held in place by threads of jobs Sometimes one has to live the past to get to the present it’s in the congressional record and in spring’s terrified green leaving us equivocally at sea telling stories about the land I am happy when I am with you under the mosquito netting reaching for each other’s alveoli lustily playing what might be rummikub englishing each stream (somewhat hampered by the way something moves across bodies the globe of anxiety that makes a copse of poplars where no poplars ever were) But we are past the mudbrick martini and the friends’ plebiscite skipped those steps now knee-deep in the other’s groundwater Within reach is a tapestry of leaves and grown ink musical skin of the wrist letting go of the past’s fourth hour and its fifth Waking to nudegreen you lascivious bucket of breakfast cereals shall we daze through the survey |
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High in the office by the sea, we traded promises of chivalric fealty and worked through the agenda our parents had left for us. We were naive, having no knowledge of the virtue that lies in the mallow or the asphodel. The snowy plovers on the beach knew us for what we were, and rejected our forays during protracted coffee breaks into their nests. In those days I never went without handfuls of soap, another thing you understood. The line for pharmacopoeia and the one for deceit were each as long as a line of dunes, and we held each other’s place in them until evening, learning five seamless ways to inflict love. We were offered mandrake, but it left us headachey and unyielding, like life. The taste of self was on my tongue, your teeth capped with gold accusations. All you really wanted was the steel of my blood against your nails, and I knew that, so perhaps my love for you was a little bit crazy. But it worked, down to the bruised soul and your swelling breasts which I refused to acknowledge, knowing you wouldn’t keep the baby. After the forest fire, everything was different between us. Wooden fences ran at our approach and the lakes went orange. Gone were the tulips, the old country’s abbreviations, those lovely dinners of forced meat. You told me you’d die a spinster with beautiful legs, then promptly got married, still fighting for custody over our abandoned flesh. |
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DAVID B. GOLDSTEIN’s poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Epoch, Shampoo, Zeek, Watchword, and other journals, and is currently online at Dusie. He teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at the University of Tulsa, where he is currently completing a book of poems and a critical work about digestion and originality in early modern England. |
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