Yes But

The stance of desire. At the garden party, her face
toward his mouth and he points and calls them by name:
peony, rhododendron, foxglove, their finger-shaped corollas,
the cardiac stimulant of digits that lead to a woman’s heart.

From the footbridge, I watch him and his other lover
poke fingers into the mouths of open flowers. Those Chinese finger traps
that stick, like the imprint of thumbs on skin, the way he’ll do it,
later, above the suprasternal notch, because this is before concrete

and metal in distant rain, lines before gestures, before the double-
block of no harm, no foul, the yes but of wrists burning
against velvet, the two-finger chord he’ll play on the throat,
and lipstick a shade too dark, the sound of his voice when he’ll say don’t.

But now, dusk. Bats drop from the sky like gestures of good faith.
We’re alone when he pulls me under the clothesline, takes my wrist
and tells me it’s safe. I memorize the soft lines of his face
until the flowers fade, the footbridge, and forgive him for what will become

the lovetaps and suckerpunch of morning, when I’ll have to shake out
the numbness but not the fire, felon, arranged heart, brooding flower
that splits the concrete, even when he leaves, even when disease becomes
the last form of self-expression, the hip, the lip, the distance nothing

more than a torch song. But tonight the lines run over my head.
They loop back on themselves, a warning, this but no further, as if
a resonance is here with no hope of there being anything more,
as if only the bats could fall crazy to earth and return.

From chapbook Obscene Rhetoric (Philadelphia, Pa.: Archangel Press, 2002)

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