Elk Public House, 1:37am
Before I can think about it, or
yes this is the way a body thinks
after a few beers, you have me pressed
against the sink, you have my jeans at my ankles, lost
and light in this suddenly
open field, its cool night falling to my
bare shoulders, and some distant birds
with beautiful voices, they’re singing
through the walls of buzzing electronica
stripping the filth from the mirror,
all anatomy in permanent marker
labeled with fat black arrows:
cunt, balls, and fuck me
if you’re in the (area code) 509
melting away like sound muffled underwater
now in this dark field
of grass and stars, yes
keep ignoring the banging on the door
this urgency of being
here, now
barely undressed, this urgency,
you looking at me
the way we watch a fire
burn down a forest.
Suicide
What were you doing there
pinched hollow as a bullet hole
behind your grief, long willows dormant
and hushed in your head? Unspun like a dizzy child
on a tire swing. Running from a monsoon overhead
out of breath and wet, girl, not so unlike the fitful orgasms
that would have had you yet. Or surrounded
by banks of sand and a white circle moon
night’s translucence passing through your
ocean’s hands. A burning kite chasing another
across an empty sky. If only twenty-eight-year-old me
could have told fourteen-year-old you.
Highway songs up and down the Pacific coast
grabbing you and holding on
your lover dozing beside you until dark
sliding up from the water
covers the road’s curves
drawing shadows across the dotted
lines. And you would have found a turn-out and slept
on his shoulder, beside a cliff, with the smell of sea
and night sinking back into its secret,
not leaping over the edge, not even thinking of it.
