Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

The tiny freckles
clustered on your collar bone

are just six
of the reasons
my lips keep

seeking you.

I.

You have only these hours and days.

II.

When you accept them,
you have no need of
afterlives or prior lives.
You have the single empty box
of a life and all the universe
to fill it with.

III.

Live like this: there is an end to you.
Don’t fear it. Don’t wallow.
Flowers wilt. Rivers dry up.
Even the stars extinguish themselves.
Have your time and then let it go.

IV.

Do not shy from your ending
with mad horse eyes.

V.

Allow the box of your life,
when you have filled it,
to have its spaces.
Resist the temptation
to stuff the gaps with gods
who do not know you.

VI.

Pull uncertainty into your arms
and kiss her lips;
too many neglect her,
but she is an eager lover,
and desires only your attention.
Let her teach you how to say
“I don’t know and that is beautiful”

VII.

You have only these minutes and years.

I think for a moment
you sweep past:

a smoke of rose, a wisp of heat,
a hint of calm, a whisper
without sound but scented
with your lips, your tongue,
your breath, it eddies through
the turbulence
of my everyday.

Inhale your scent,
pretend your scent
is present to be inhaled.

Swallow the lump
rising in my throat.

This is how I get through
the moments between
our meetings.

The weekend over, we left your parent’s house,
and drove home in the rain,
tense and tired to our bones
from your father’s opinions about the government,
from your mother’s mild but persistent interrogations,
from your little brother and his dog Cheyanne,
both joyful, but barking desperate for attention.

Neither of us said anything,
you with your arms crossed in the passenger seat,
me with hands white-knuckled on the wheel,
weary to be home, but with miles to go.

The sun went down, and drove darker
until we rolled along County Road 23,
past a dairy farm and a Baptist church
with a parking lot full of farm trucks,
even though it was getting late
even for country preachers high on hellfire.

Those were the last lights we passed
for miles, until pine trees nuzzled close in the dark
and we hit a patch freshly paved:
new asphalt so dark, so smooth it seemed like
we sailed down a river of night,

a slick of black glass that stretched
to the limits of the high-beams
and seemed as if it might crack beneath the tires.

We were both startled
by the tiny tree frog that popped into the road,
by his little jubilant leap into the rain,
his dance in light and wetness, his happy transit,
and your hand flew to my thigh
as I pressed the brake and slowed to let him pass.

Neither of us said anything,
but your hand settled from tension to comfort
and I eased my grip on the wheel
as the small green wanderer landed safely
in the pine straw piled on the other side of the road,

and then we continued on our way,
but your hand never moved,
not for the next fifty miles until we made it home.

What have you done to me?

Morning wakes light
in the window.
I pull away the covers
and lift myself up,
but my bones fall out
between the sheets.

You are still asleep;
the sun creeps across your lips
and my skeleton beside you
cups your breast in his hand,
his bones fat-yellowed
and marrowed out with desire;
I leave your side and leave my love
beside you, I leave all
the white osteology of my love.

Is my love macabre?
My love rattles.
My love clatters and clacks,
my love snaps and pops at the joints.
I cannot quiet it.
I can try to bury
all the raw cartilage and calcium
of my love, I can try to crack it
and mortar it down
to so much grey dust,

but my love must be bone:
it wrestles under the muscle
and blood of my love,
under the skin of my love,
the bones of my love are what
the tendons and tissues of my love
bind to when I love you.

My love is lunate and scaphoid.
It is vertebral, sternal, my love
is cranial and pelvic and hyoid.
My love is two hundred and six
bone white statements of my love.

I watched a bat snipe
summer bugs
from their streetlight haven
and thought of you:
your artful lips
the sharp clip of your teeth
beneath my ear,
a target never missed,
no matter how I move,
as if my whispered name
allows you to echo-locate it.

In a few minutes,
I’ll be home:
I will take you by the hand
turn off the light
dangle together
upside down
off the edge of the bed
with you.

Shh.
Just listen to the place
where the air from my lungs
starts kissing the air from yours.