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Afterwards, when
my words
no longer
stuck to your mouth
and you hung
up the phone as the water rose,
you looked back past
the vacant lots strung with clothes
lines
and tire guts just outside the broken window.
This is not autumn.
This is not winter.
You will not miss me.
Still, you felt the leaning
of something larger against your own weight.
There, in the vanishing
point the horizon insisted on, you couldn’t help
but notice the movement
of all things
and saw yourself for a second as
a migratory fish might see
the water’s flow.
It is not hard to touch
the dishes left in the cupboard, stillborn objects
named to create order in our lives,
the milk still in the carton, silking the cup as it pours,
that little bit of money beneath the rug
just in case.
In your sleep,
horses do not clamor from the wound in the sky,
though the clouds would make it seem that way.
This much is true.
Even as the world slowed
down into evening, your hand
reached through the barbedwire fencing to cordon off
the sundown’s squared hymnal. This is not summer.
This is not winter.
This is the season of red ants
coming out of the cracks
in sidewalks and we mark time, oddly,
you and I, this way.
Stripmalls creep towards the west.
Your hand opens,
distancing the regression of half notes
into now, and you see your body as a yellowing thing
swept aside by some vast rain
into the dusk of an unkempt fermata.
See. there’s nothing to atone for.
Nobody to forgive.
This is not summer. This is not
summer. This is not summer.
You downshift to third as you drive
and the odor of burned clutch
reminds you of roadkill or sex. You put
your finger between
her legs and taste it again.
Afterwards, I picked up the phone
and listened to my own breathing, smelled my own snot in my nose.
I wanted to tell you what
I forgot to say. Something like,
when you get back,
I’ll show you the different kinds
of leaves I’ve gathered
from the abandoned overpass, how
the television tells me
somewhere in the North, somewhere in the South, armies
are gathering, burning stones,
standing
for something.
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