Retrograde
I love fall weather,
but not the season
I tell myself
As I fold my grief like fitted
bedsheets: fraying elastic, the faint
scent of the detergent you weren't allergic to
and my palms
holding the creases
against my skin, a way to live
into them. I am
folding. My sorrows
to make room
for something bigger
hopefully better
don’t ask me
for any precision
other than my hands
against your hands
These are our mountains—
of holding
a mountain of folds smoothed out for the moon, and you,
and the impossible season Mercury makes of two.
Angels in America (after Canadian Customs)
Once again, someone always falls in, Christ, I think it's the second coming – of two bodies, of four blue eyes, six green eyes, and eight brown eyes - say we count those reflected in the mirror of the past [at midnight, in the purest dark, in anyone's grief].
I haven't been able to recognize the voice of your old silence or see the heavenly messages scrawled in the middle of a manic state where our bodies were glass, and from ourselves, we drank a type of impossible water.
Desire needlessly spills over me, a cursed tonic. For my thirsty thirst, what can the promise of your forever-closed eyes do? I speak of something no longer in this world. I speak to someone who lies - both within and without me.
And I am drenched, naked in memory of that white night. So possessed, we made love that whole time, a spell that five years conspired to break.
Can we suffer too much reality in the space of this secret dusk? I undress, every night, without you. Horrified by the vastness of my want: to live alone, to bring you back. But not of what's in front of me. Or of the mirror that pounds. This clock, the laceration that reaches back through time, from which my desire, love, and cry pour out.
The night will open itself at least once.
It's enough.
You see.
You've seen
the end of all things.
The ecstasy of being one,
then two in the mirror,
and suddenly you're six
feet below ground.
But, then, to speak
of this final discovery:
I was the one dying
when you left
Now each night,
I plead with God if
he will cling these wings
and grant you the grace
that grew in your place
And I wonder if your mother would ask:
do you still weep for Melissa at night?
But I refuse to cry anymore in this poem
So I tell the dark a story
that we both can believe