Month: April 2021

You are sleeping when I come home.
The cat stirs from her nest,
butts her head against my ankle,
her motorboat purr the loudest sound
in this sleeping house.

The bedroom door always creaks
and I hope it will not wake you,
even though I know by now
that when I strip off my clothes
and crawl into bed beside you,
you will stir. A murmured hello
in the dark, fingers finding a hand
in the dark.

When I wake, you are gone.

We converse in notes and memos.
A scrawled poem, the sketch of a heart,
sticky-note I Love You taped to
a laptop cover, to the bottom of
a bowl of keys, artifacts traversing
the gulf between our waking hours.

A convoy of tiny black ants rolls across
the cover of the book you left on the floor
beside the old porch swing.

For the last hour, I have amused myself by flicking
every fourth ant away from the line of his peers,
just a few inches.

Even that momentary isolation
panics him, and he scrambles, jitter-legged,
to reorient himself into the normal processions
of his tiny black life.

A few inches, a few hundred miles.
It’s a silly thing, the disruption created
from being beside a person and then
not being beside them any longer.

I would like to pick up river stones
and find your likeness in them:
worn smooth, multicolored, still
glistening with cold water.

     But you are not like river stones.
You are like stones before the river has
worn them: rough-spurred and chalky,
your colors hidden under yourself, dry
and thirsting for cold water.

One stone is not better than the other.
One is beautiful for the colors erosion
has coaxed out of it. The other,
because it thirsts to be weathered.

In the dark, when I cannot see the shape
of your body, you seem even smaller than your
smallness; you are still trembling, the little
needles of your fingernails burrowed
into my arm.

This is my favorite moment:
curled against you, my ear against your back,
I am listening to the rapid patter
of your small mouse heart,
to the quick mouse breaths
you are breathing.

She places her hand on the table,
fingers splayed, and I am tracing
the shape of her hand with
my fingertip, as if it were a merchantman
navigating the harbors and bays
of a peninsular quintet:
where shall I berth? The cape of her
index, the horn of her thumb, the
shore of her slender wrist?

I am a lost captain wandering
from one ivory cliff-shelf to the next.