Aubade
Here, in this moment, street sweepers out
before first light breaks, branches heavy with ice,
I look for something stable in all this shifting:
the stray always outside, clanking through metal cans
as it forages for food. The hunting bear
turned in toward the house for a while,
satiated still by the body she raises toward him,
just so. To say never is to deny ice melting
onto clean streets, an entire night’s sleep
when there’s nothing to run away from in dreams.
To say I’ll never love you that way, is to see
in her face something heavy as olive trees,
something that tells of men turning to village
before last light falls,
I’ll leave you someday tied to a fit of your own desires,
and our bodies will be wracked with pain.
That pain for free will, clad somewhat scantily
in a cool breeze, the shuddering only an outward expression
of the body internal. Too much loss to believe
in desert rain, though I am told people have seen it,
coming fast over the hills. It’s black and powerful and cuts
through sky, the way blue eyes can go gray without warning.
The dead I’ve known have this in common:
at the end their eyes turned inward
as if they could see something, cold as sidewalks,
coming toward them. Beyond that, the latch is off
the gate again. Everything homebound gets in.
From chapbook Obscene Rhetoric (Philadelphia, Pa.: Archangel
Press, 2002); first published as “This Moment” in The
American Poetry Review’s Philly Edition (October 1997)