Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

You went back up to our room to find a towel
and while I waited for you to return,
I bobbed in the deep end of the hotel pool,
watching an old couple kiss in the shallows.

I knew we would never last that long.

Not through decades,
not through crow’s feet and laugh lines,
not through enough for our hands to wrinkle,
no matter how long we submerged
ourselves in each other.

Briefly, I considered swimming over
to ask what secret preserved them,
to ask what I could do to save us from drowning,
but before I got the chance, you came back down
and asked what I was thinking about.

I could think of no explanation,
so I said nothing and I dove to the bottom
and I sat in the deep with my eyes open,
staring up at you staring down
through gallons at me.

On the coldest night of the year,
a squirrel picked a fight
with the transformer
at the top of a power pole.

Neither made it out alive,
and the lights went out,
and the heat and the Internet
and I went out, too,
to stare down our street of dark houses,
with their black-windowed faces
and the frost in their yards.

Beyond our neighborhood,
the rest of the city glowed,
still bright, still flushed electric,
still full of warmth and motion,
and I realized we were alone
with the cold and the dark,
left to huddle under our blankets
and try to rub ourselves warm.

Before I went inside
to fumble for candles
and flashlights,
I stopped, just for a moment,
and imagined this must be
what a foot feels like
on the wrong side
of a blood clot.

Every time you say
you love seashells,
I know what you mean
is that you love conch
and whelk and nautilus.

That you love
the broad fans of scallop shells,
spiral mollusks, sea snails,
white sand dollars
like round suns,
lying like jewels
on the edge of the sea.

I am a kind of seashell, too:
a handful of color,
sharp-edged grit,
sea glass, sand,
coral and whale bone,
and shining,
here and there,
with mother of pearl.

You stand undressed
in front of the mirror,
and every time,
you cast open the gates
and step
into your labyrinth of
doubts, every time,
into winding passages
full of thorns
and black brambles.
You wander in
just to scratch
the itch
of hating yourself.

You pinch your hips,
and squeeze your breasts
and frown at yourself.
You are looking
for the minotaur,
for the shaggy head
and the bloody horns,
for the muscle and fur
that will put its knee
into your back
and break you.

You poke the lines
of your face, you
wander the moss-
frosted stones
and pick your way
through, you listen for his
lowing, for his hooves
stamping on the rock,
for the hot breath he huffs
and sniffs for you,
and with every step,
you draw nearer and nearer.

But there is more
in your labyrinth
than that.

Past the brambles
and the bends,
the cobblestones break
and there is a garden
growing wild in the center,
full of red and yellow dahlias,
full of climbing ivy and
white virgin’s bower,
and the full brightness of the sun.

The minotaur
doesn’t dare go near there,
he doesn’t dare.

I spent days trying to write
the perfect letter for you.

I wrote and scratched out
a field of words. I crumpled paper
until my floor started to think
it was a cotton field,
and I thought of inviting you
to come pick through it,

to see if you could find
the softness I was trying
to tell you about

but I was too afraid
your fingers would wear raw
on the bolls, that you would grow
tired of stooping
to pick up the things I’d grown
in my head

so I put an empty envelope
in your mailbox, and wrote

     Love me, please,

on the outside,
instead.