Like the first morning . . .

On The Way Back From the Bathroom


Outside, the moon descends
along rails constructed
in such a way that first
it rolls left across the sky
in a steady declension of four degrees.

At its western end it drops,
reverses its route, rolls right
and downward again. It will
continue this way all night,
along an alternating
and constant slope,
and I watch it crossing back and forth,
dropping down,
over and over,
from the open window
where I have stopped on my way back from the bathroom.

I wonder if this is magnificent.

In the mean time, the shelves along the wall remain filled with things I’d hoped to get to but never did. To learn Italian. To speak French. And while there is some regret about those things I never took up, I must tell you that I did once make the time to share a drink with a wooly white mammoth in an Andover train station.

Until then I’d not realized
how precisely
a white wooly mammoth might
press rings of smoke from a droopy bottom lip,
even while steadying a rather thin tortoise-shell
cigarette holder in a hoof,
a bent crumble of cool ash dangling at its tip.

He did not seem to mind that I stared,
morbidly, into the disproportionately
large, unpigmented eye jellying behind
the monocle he wore, its cord attached
somewhere inside his thick and flowing mane.

This event occurred, actually, during a particularly monotonous cross-country tour Myrtle and I purchased when we were first married.

“Clink.” The moon drops
down onto the next silver rail
and the clock across the room blinks,
“Go Slowly Along Your Way.”

Beneath the red rise of mercury
I spot a woman in the field
adjacent to our own.
She is playing a tuba
and I smell blueberry muffins in the air.
The sky rumbles with tuba: blurts Tuba Tuba Tuba.
I shut the window and draw the curtain before moving back to bed.

As I pass, books whisper to me in languages I do not understand
and the bronze Shiva occupying the top shelf begins dancing,
arms wriggling and alive like snakes.

“Stop shuffling your feet,” Myrtle croaks at me. I peel back the blanket, slide in next to her, cradle her gently in my arms. Her booty is pudgy and warm. “I love you like a blueberry muffin,” I say. I whisper the words in Italian. I repeat her name, so fluidly, in French—“Myrtille.”

It occurs to me that this is magnificent.

This is so even when Myrtle says nothing in response.
It remains the case even after we forget each other and fall asleep,
lulled by the cadences of the mammoth moon as it drops and rolls,
all night long, through the tuba-blueberry sky, white clouds
wound like wool around the narrowing encroachments of
another morning’s gray approach.

Have I told you lately . . . ?

Night Full of Absence

Time moves as slow as stone without you near. I find myself in this strange limbo of desires—to be close and yet not to push too near too fast. I was saddened that we argued as hotly as we did, troubled, enormously. And yet a faith sets in, that our friendship is stronger than either of us suspected, strong and sure, even when we are not.

This short period that feels so heavy brings to mind how deeply you have sent your roots into my life, reveals what a deep mark would be left were you to pull them from its soils. I have been seized by obsessive need, to talk with you, to listen, taking comfort in your voice, even knowing there are no words adequate, none soft enough, none strong enough, for what I long to hear.

Our words rise and fall behind language, like the ground of all we see and feel. Ours is the language of eyes through which the heart burns, of knowing without grasping, of hands that touch wordlessly, in the surging silences of jungles and deserts and enormous skies full of clear, throbbing nights, nights whose skins stretch thin, skies so filled with playfulness that they will themselves to the air they live in, hoping for fire.

I remain incapable of expounding any of these visitations, these spectres that rise up in so many bodiless nights, hours full of rushing spaces, your eyes nowhere to beguile me. I am flung outward by words escaping to find their place in your hands and your limbs, these words heavy with life like vines.

This garden of feeling we have cultivated makes a place for the sun, for water and salt and earth. We needn’t touch them, the years, to feel them, how they have flourished within the borders of this garden's rock walls. These several years sing sonorously, steadily, cemented and meshed together like the letters of a cherished word, a secret word, a word held between us like a prolonged breath, like wet, imprecise kisses, lips groping among last things, braced in waves that en-trance the constant moon, waves ever changing the lettering of the world, the many ways that love is spelled.

I'd wait a million years

TURN AROUND

He was three hours into the four hour drive home when he called her.

“Hey,” she answered.

She always answered with that initial "Hey," and whenever he heard her say it he was drawn to a territory that felt warm, familiar. In that space distance held sway, but the distance bordered a tract of heart that had known her voice long before he'd heard the sound of it.

“I almost called to tell you to turn around.” She spoke with a natural air.

“I will, you know.” He did not need to think.

“Don’t,” she said when he told her how far he’d already driven.

After they were done talking he recalled her face, her hair. He replayed her voice, “Hey,” and took the next exit, looking for a turn around. “Crazy,” he said.

To turn around then would make a four hour trip into another seven hour drive. Only the day before he’d driven from North Carolina to spend the night with her in Virginia. Now he was back in Jersey--and suddenly heading south.

His back and his legs had stiffened by the time he pulled the car along the curb. She’d left the door open and he let himself in. Drumming music and the hum of a treadmill flowed up out of the basement. So he dropped his bag near the door and went for a walk. The January air felt sharp when he breathed it in and the evening turned to dark. He was happy looking at the houses, recording the names of streets he passed.

In less than an hour he was back and watching television when she emerged from the basement dabbing her brow with a towel. They talked a little and she left to go shower. When she returned in slippers and a T-shirt they called out for Chinese food. She stood at the sink rinsing a plate. He leaned down and kissed her shoulder. She smiled.

After dinner, he stretched out on the sofa and watched her sink cross-legged into an overstuffed chair. The day had ended. Neither of them said very much. A toned thigh stretched out from under her shirt. It was the shirt he’d bought her, the shirt that sported the Chinese character for “Strength.”

He’d been staring at her. “What?” she asked.

He wanted to tell her about what was going on inside his body. “You’re beautiful,” he said instead, and made a less than heartfelt effort to ignore the perfect length of leg stretched over the opposite knee.

She looked back at the television, and he succumbed to a swell of desire so strong that he had to close his eyes to hide it from her. “Strength.”

What he was feeling then was something he hadn’t felt for a long time, a longer time than he’d like to admit. He wondered what the Chinese character for "Craving" looked like.

Soon after, the television went off. They both agreed it had grown very late. She made sure he had enough blankets in his room and said goodnight. She looked up as she turned, half over her delicate shoulder. The full smile of her mouth blossomed and he almost wanted to cry. “Good night,” he said instead.

He turned out the light. Desire tore him into a thousand tiny shreds. His ex-wife never moved him so deeply. Nor had other women, women he thought he’d loved. This was something else, something beautiful and mysterious and full. He surrendered to it's resonance, released his heart and soul and body to its airs. Sleep finally overtook his rigid body, his lips pursing together, a final note holding, a last breath full of her name, the name he turned around on his tongue and blew back out into the night.