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Partners | | The
Way I'm Taught By Heart |
Partners
1.
I
like sleeping with the old table leg
close beside me under the covers in bed.
It's so placid, still and sturdy
in its slumber. It tolerates my knee
hooked over its finely lathed middle
and the way our ankles and feet
couple beneath the blanket.
Without
attention or liberty (unlike
window or mirror), it withdraws wholly
and satisfactorily into the tight
oak of its own parameters.
Hardly
restless, it never resists
itself or cants recitations to maker
or scholars. Its respiration is a lasting
lullaby, more predictable than my breath,
its heart less phantom, more upholding
than my heart.
During
winter snows, I seek it,
I cradle it to my bed, I tuck it.
We somnia close, belly to belly
all through the night of the night.
2.
I
like sleeping with great-uncle's
sea-crusted rope. I wind it in the familiar
route up my legs, round my waist, between
my breasts, a repeated necklace.
My
sleep composes to its spirals,
follows its blind underwater passages,
the lines of its many past knots
loosened and lost.
The
light of its fragrant coils
is the silver of its lovely residue:
dried spittle, fish flakes, moon oil.
With
its head-end like a thumb
stuck in my mouth in the dark, subsumed,
I suck the salt-jack of its prehistoric
waves and currents.
3.
I
take the carefully tuned guitar along
to sleep with me at night. Wrought
below the frets with ivory crescent moons
and their ebony crescent shadows,
it reclines best on its back, keeping
to its own pillow, keys resting
against the fringed satin.
With
a mere accidental brush of my hand
across the center of its nakedness
in the dark, I feel the two of us
and the entire bed, springs and boards alike,
become a humming, six-stringed doxology.
The
guitar surrounds a hollowness
as desperate as my sleep inside
its framework, as immeasurable as the night
inside its boundaries, as possible
as any truth inside its fabrication,
and sings the same.
The
Way I'm Taught By Heart
The
way I'm taught how to move
my hand along the swelve
and lank of your naked back
is by having watched how a pine
in easy wind smooths itself along
the close spine of a summer
night. The way I know how to drink
at your mouth is by remembering
my mouth at the earth once
taking sweet spring water
with my eyes closed.
I
learn how to speak to you now
by imitating the cholla blossoms
who, in their hour, speak of lust
and expiation, and I seek you
in the same way the marblewings
opening in dampness at dawn admit
for their edification every last
probe of sun possible.
Rising
and falling inside your arms,
I understand how mosses and cress lose
and gain over and over inside the hold
of a stream. I've seen the headlong
push forward of a trout nudging
upcreek in a current.
Deep
sea geographies of spiraling
canyons and cols, sudden stellar-scatters
and the chances beyond--these are the same words
as the words of your body, your name,
as I pronounce it, identical to wind-borne
riflings of rain above desert light.
Here
I am, like God, the pulsing
center in a gather of waxwings widening
and tightening in their flock against
the sky, like God, a wayward thread
of cottonwood lifting over fields,
forswearing forever all bones,
every place.
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