Remembering Hal and Gail
everyone
looks younger
in love.
we haven’t been
there much,
lately. i count
crows
feet around
your coronaries,
the hard-ish wrinkles
over my veins.
we need more red,
re-awakened
part-sun days,
thornless. river-
mud between
our toes, not
rose but rust-gold
long(ing)-
fingered lenses
through which
all the world
seems wetter and
better for it,
like spring,
like summer
in a mirror
in a cabin
on a side street
by the ocean, yes.
everyone
looks younger
in love.
lust poem no.31
there is the air
poured
from stale radiator to pool
over bare skin
and open sill.
there is the lament
of a passing train
this side the river. there
is firewood stacked
beside the door, but no
goddamn snow.
it weighs like the hesitation
in her eyes that he
can’t see: that she
is tired of sad poems,
their puckered footsteps like
icefall on the second day
of spring. all ragged clouds
& slush & cold
metaphor. her skin
is forgetful. his hands
are on the small of her.
they weigh like silence,
like stone, like
remembering, brim
with words left
over which long
for un-houred mondays, for
un-hung evers, un-strung lives,
for words which long.
crazy (déjà something)
is the sum of us
counted out into highway miles
between here and the ocean: two-
oh-seven the plastic
inscribed on the single room
key; three close
hours we fight
to keep the bed
from squeaking while your
four gushing walls tattoo
against my own
ever, a millisecond that melts
skin into skin & still
hurts with yearning; the backdrop blue-
lit bourbons spilt
through drip-
ping minutes of Saturday night
into the misty evanescence
of Sunday morning &
suddenly it’s five
twenty-five and unbearable:
the distance, the leaving in
darkness, the cleaving
breathless-ness of one.
lust, observed
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
in my hometown
the laundromat
doors are open at 3 in the afternoon
to catch whispers
of a triple-digit Ju-ly breeze.
the machines whir,
and there is country coming
through the overhead.
small talk is all in Spanish: que
calorcito, eh? black-
laced sweet nothings
of a frazzled mamá drip
from the handrail of one of those
little carts. the floor
is dirty, and the air
smells of bleach.
the coke machine doesn’t work,
but the dryers
are wonderfully efficient and she
feels more like mamacita
than she has in months, con-
siders bringing one
of those country songs
to life, stripping
down to her calzoncitos while
watching machines spin
sweat & loneliness from her thin bed-
room sheets.
