St. Gemini Looks at the Map St. Caduceus Drew Her One Cloudy Morning to Find Her Way Home
QuailBellMagazine.com
Your understudy seduces me
like an aria grown redundant
until the mezzo hoarsens & you lean
in, knowing this could
get interesting — my precipice, antelope,
stone-cutting sloth. Establish your
estuary in me during sleep. Alarm like a lazy
cock, it doesn't wake me
from my dreamt botany, barely
midwifes me this monotony: I abandon
myself, an impotent boy plunging
into honeysuckle. Daybreak comes embarrassed
& bright as misplaced snowfall on some
Atlantic cape in autumn. We swim
less towards each other than through
the scent we fear
not missing. Sap from dying
maples reaches us as amber
congealing to glass. We will
mold a menagerie
of monsters from it.
Virus who taught me all unraveled
virtues of yearning, my mouth hurts for your curve. You will not spread
your calligraphy brush against me again
nor surface past this lake of curdled doubt.
As a child, I found
a rabbit in brush, stroked it, oblivious that its heart
had stopped at my touch.
This is how I learned
fear; abandoned
between tracks & graffiti underground, a mattress
must lend itself to vagabond bodies. Like a hound clenching
its kill until sinew
is pried from jaw: let inertia
testify, you whom I covered & left
sighing, sleep-eyed as a nightjar.
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