Matthew
1.
Before I knew I’d love men,
before brawn became the stuff
of night sweats and sweat
itself a seedy, tempting glaze,
there was our wordless adjacency,
our awkward, giggly shuffle, two
beans in a fertile cavity ready
to bear and shoulder dirt
upward into revealing light.
Before I knew I’d love you,
like so many rising suns we love expectantly,
in fantastical memoriam,
I loved you.
2.
An old woman that bore too many
bags of groceries, walked so slowly
on the sidewalk, the sun white, the air
static, heat in the 90s, she leaned
into the weight of one over-laden
arm, then a bag bottomed out, cans and eggs hit
the concrete, and as she bent, barely able
to squat to recover her food, more bags spilled
over, and she stood staring at the ground,
grimacing and turning in circles, arms limp.
The bus shut its doors and lumbered us away
in its own smoke. I turned to you
and your face was red and wet,
and I knew we’d both right then
imagined our grandmothers,
and how it was that they’d been getting their groceries home
all these years alone.
Such figures wrench us.
Like the girl who submitted her snapshots of Wales
to the art exhibition, late and unframed
because she had been luring an orphan
kitten out from beneath her trailer.
She would mount the pictures on cardboard
around a hand-drawn map, she said,
because the cliffs and the sea
were themselves so beautiful.
As you told me this story, your voice cracked
with empathy, and the skin around your eyes swelled.
Every now and then I walk through the exhibit
and stop before Cymru, the topography
of someone's fullest moment, and a totem
of your splayed heart.
3.
Do you see
yourself better in my talk, too?
Is my company serene stuffing?
Do you find my smell in swirls
of linen and hanging in the room
suddenly, like a note left on invisible
stationary, an airborne thought
whisking you out of stale, solitary
space? Do you feel the metallic
warmth beneath your thighs,
sitting on the silver round dish
strung up at your end of the scale?
For me, the lapses are fewer and fewer.
4.
My eyes sat still
in their sockets, aligned
and stared into them-
selves for a long time.
My body was hot sand shifting
and static in the periphery.
My old confidence was the anomaly
that needled the hard
core in your gut,
that led the motion
to announce me indelibly
average, but also saw
to it that I would become
my own martyr.
5.
I sat in the living room, early
woken by errands and work,
and there were two birds outside,
blue fans on their heads, thin
legs, lift, pause, dip.
That morning everything,
the book on my lap, the slow
sunlight, three deer I saw
just once a year, that morning
herons drumming in the sweetgrass,
your leaving for work, again, so early,
everything,
the bubbling fish bowls, the riddled
throw, the bath, everything
reminded me of everything
I hoped to have done
by then, so much,
so much more poetry, and so
many more tears.
6.
Today, because I’ve noticed you,
conversation will fail miserably
clipping short the wick,
grocery stores will crowd after hard weather
ether frost on sills,
and in the car ahead, eyes in a sliver of glass
will dash, stare, take and vie—
things will make themselves seen, clean, ordinary—
even six years entwined
I’ve noticed you today,
rising swift in the linens
solstice in young light.
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