he said, meaning Let us be free of our fealty to blood
but not of each other. I said
Nothing. The lamp sway shivered my indecision.
The lamp light vivified my shadows. I noted
things about the room around us
—inventory of our belonging,
random & wrong & quitless
like skin tags. Bookshelves held up
the walls. The coffee table upheld
more books on its legs; the mortal lives behind the word
woodwork; the next-to-nothing we spent for those
spent years. When everything here eventually
gave out, we got more. Innovations
like the cigarette & the percolator
competed to keep our minds inventive, productive
as mines & one-trick fields
& same-fated farmers paid a fraction
of a tractor. To track these intakes down rows
of a pedigreed European auto stock corporation notebook
legitimized manuscripts that were otherwise mine
but, for archivists in the failing universities of the future
who own my dead papers,
harder on the eyes. As for love,
I knew I longed to be valued
in such a way as to watch his hands
atrophy & petrify, reluctant to degrade
my image of self-sufficiency. It cost too much
to be among the state’s estate as long as I would live
to have nobody give a little, if just a damn
that today I ambulated; or imagine me
bathing, submerged to the shoulders
& disaccustomed to thirst
for clean water. Please, please, he repeated. Begging
hounded by its echo. A voice was singing the spirit
he figured he’d recovered.
He got up to get free. He stood up
to leave me. I hovered like the shadow
crossing his heart, saying Nothing. Suddenly he
was such a man (manpower
surrounded me), with his new leaves & physical uncertainties
he was outfitted to risk
while the memory of feeling cold
knitted my skin. The wind came in
& leaves turned over leaves alit upon
his body / one of the bodies he’d chosen I closed it:
to leave. the eyes,
the hole in the ground,
my mouth, the door. What opened:
the decanter, the window, the
surface of water, my hand &
another body leapt over another rushing in.