Intractable between them grows
a garden of barbed wire and roses.
Burning briars like flames devour
their too innocent attire.
Dare they meet, the blackened wire
tears the intervening air.
Trespassers have wandered through
texture of flesh and petals.
Dogs like arrows moved along
pathways that their noses knew.
While the two who laid it out
find the metal and the flower
fatal underfoot.
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’ t start growling.
He isn’ t a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “Nice to see you,”
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’ t an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
Let us tunnel
Through the rubble,
Through the thrum.
Let us rut through the sum
Of who we were,
Or are,
Or will be in the years to come:
A couple
Of someones
Who used to be in love.
Used to be in love.
Ho. Hum.
These days: Seem to be in hate.
Gypsum, marble, pyrite, slate.
See here. A pit of snakes.
Look there. The rock of your rages.
And I’ m in a cable-cage, slinking down your shaft.
You fondle that hefty What if...? as if
“The writer. It’ s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that
winter of our nation’ s discontent. That first time
I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked
in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small
apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great
named cats you gassed in the move. I couldn’ t keep them.
You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved
your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers, firme
from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes
And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins:
behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs
and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves —
and then is gone,
leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air.
Someone will push the house over one day,
Some spacedozer give it a shove,
But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard,
These are a labour of love.
All winter we set these cobbles in place,
Or was it the summer as well?
Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers
For ones that looked suitable.
The old house decayed – along with us –
Will a strange new resident
Admire the patio made in joy
Wondering what we meant?
The love we’ ve defined for ourselves
in privacy, in suffering,
keeps both of us lonely as a fist,
but does intimacy mean a happy ending?
I’ m afraid of marriage.
Driving past them at night, the shadows
on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives:
a father stuck in a job, his daughter
opening her blouse to strangers.
The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe
all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours
in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,
a reaction sending out runners across her chest,
a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back
into fashion, their son coming back
from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime
and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger
spread down the long hallway of their house
and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’ s doubled
The first person in recorded history
struck by a comet slept on her couch
across the road from the Comet Drive-In
and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee,
and woke her. Everything that hurts
hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary
on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated
that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built
so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent
like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm... Here
He startled to see a statue of blind
justice really did loom over the courtroom. But
remained determined to scorn symbolism.
She needed a quarter to call her lover —
the docket was full, she’ d be late for lunch —
and he gave her one. It was not a taunt,
acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was
a quarter. The fact that they had done this —
even this! — together and cordially,
