We are not dealing with trivialities.
I don’t care about the shape of your skin
or the mechanics of insertion
or the posture of excretion.
I have chased that mercury across the linoleum before,
and I know how little it all means.
I am coming for something more essential
than your liver.
I knew it worried him,
no matter what he said.
I knew he thought I’d go back to her.
Even in the beginning,
when things were good,
he’d ask questions.
Later on,
when things got bad,
I’d cut off my fingernails
and come home late.
This rock against which I throw myself,
causing soft bruises to seep through my thinning flesh,
the one I can not manage to lever away to see my path ahead,
the one blocking the sunlight of my solitary future
is
the boulder against which I rest, exhausted from the world,
safe from glare and invasion,
the one I rub cheek and hand over,
intimate and undulating as flesh.
He is telling her about a trip
he is about to take.
He is leaving out anything that might hurt her.
Who he is taking.
What he feels.
Why he left her.
His voice is carefully casual.
She nods, smiles absently.
She traces the barely raised ink
of her Pepsi bottle
with an unpolished fingernail,
scraping slightly,
finding no gap,
no place to begin its destruction.
‘for your husband shall be your longing, though he have dominion over you.’ Genesis 3:16
So this is the plan:
this throb,
this molten river coursing
from nipple to belly
as she watches the husband return
from the garden.
She kneads floury biscuits at the window,
an amethyst bracelet of bruise
appearing and disappearing into her cotton sleeve.
And this:
this portion of spirits the husband allows himself,
erasing ache and knowledge.
On the way to lunch
he calls each restless beast by name
and tucks his bottle into its straw cradle
knowing he’ll return.
Late, in their unforgiving bed,
she rends his back,
he pounds her prow of bone,
longing.
A button gone
a drunken thrust
our time ends
clean as a suicide
painless until public.
The vision turns back
counterclock
dissolves in a fiery breath.
Returning to the house he was so recently asked to leave
he waits in the kitchen,
a cup of gas station coffee in his gloved left hand.
She comes down to tell him they won’t need him today,
school’s called off and she’s staying home from work.
She offers to refill his cup.
If he has time.
While she runs the water
he stares at the down behind her right knee,
the place she always misses when shaving.
Hard already, he unsheathes his hands,
slides them under his old tee shirt,
turns her,
tries to come home.
Corn bends close
Gears gum with chatt
Motes hang motionless
Grasshoppers fly into spokes
Thistles prick calves
The bikes waiver in the turn
I can see now it’s uphill
from here to the place
where I tell you good-bye.
The writer apologizes to the women.
He thinks we don’t get the picture.
We sit next to you in class, discussing
linguistic properties or logical fallacies,
without seeing this curve of muscle or that cheekbone;
without imagining your long thigh, hard and haired over;
without watching your penis uncurl and plump in our palms
like warm dough,
your gaze softening with pleasure;
without feeling your fingers slide
into the sides of our mouths;
without tensing our tongues
as if licking the last salty drops of you.
Well we do.
We just don’t know how to talk about it.
She watches the man as he slices rare beef at his wife’s table,
balances the steel knife in his palm.
Feeling the weight and substance of her gaze returned,
her longing spools out its own story.
Leaving their home she moves carefully,
as if he were not inside her,
their musk not rising like incense,
her tongue not running against the grain of his eyebrow,
his thumbs not twinned over her nipples.
At home, awake,
quickened by the rapture of her own risen blood,
she notes each step of a fly on the down of her arm.
Small Poems de Terre 