Leave Before the Lights Come On
“as I wake into my remaining days”—W.S. Merwin
We woke tumbling through the tumescence of the winter light
Chipped upon the sky as the starlings scared past the window,
Gathering,
And spoke of the lyric of loss, the coffee and wine still mapping your cigarette bruised lips, the weather bitemarks on your cheeks, the all of it, damp miasma morning, love
A last letter across the room, disguised as a cocktail recipe, written in smoke liquor and dried cum and a smudge of a green plant, all
shards
And what you had seen and of what had been taken away in the sspun ssound of your blinking heart and how I bowed around the bent r
buckling of my waist, lassoed to your swaying, half asleep
Gone
and I spun and trawled until I there was a reawakening, beached on the shore of your hip in the oxbowed river ovyiur hearts alphabet spun in a bread line of black words, flapping in the air between us
igate in the night I chewed upon the night—
shall we speak of crippled friends who took machinery in the mechanics of war of the children we’d lost in the weary approach to one another, though listen to the swaying earth and the ruptured paths through the trees, still
Amid winter, the cutlery light and the listeners, their green tulip heads swaying,
Their hearts breaking in the wind
Decades short, a day penny dug, my finger between your teeth like a hay penny
and the love ones climbing a mountain green as a bruised bolder, your mother soft beside the sea, my father waited to his waist in grift and grief, slow and meticulous as the Meykong: his kisses serpentine all the way from Vientiane to Phnom Penh, and we left one another strands of our hairs under our nails and curled over kitchens damp with loss
All that, and the chicory breeze, scent in the wet fields passing.
shall count myself blessed.
And that remains
What was wizarded and mussdd by the missed sky and distant laugher, cloudhead thunder
atop and amid and abiding
the sky that has no words
That there are no words for that,
Scribble away, scribble away the love
All that we, you and
I love
heels and all.
Heels, shells, bandits and all,
clicking
As the door closed, the scuttling and we left before the lights came on
bodies blooming into cotton and we
disappeared from each other
Heels and all,
The long goodbyes, talas
the long pinkshaped chappelchpped loses euthanized,
ending.
