ISSUE: Spring 2001
Old love,
you lie there whistling in your sleep.
How can you have broken my heart,
made it a girl again, brimming with want,
waiting for every wind to blow up rescue?
This girl’s heart is no good to me.
The back of my hand lying in the sun
says it has been here a while; the skin
browns and furrows; there’s a callous
on my middle finger, bent with clutching
a pencil since grade school,
and beneath the third knuckle a scar
hunches like a white worm
across the ropey vein. I could do
the whole damn inventory. And you,
with your hair standing straight out
beside your ears, turning your head
in dream, how should it be you to take me
out of myself? Looking into death again
in some woman’s eyes. . . While I sit
gazing down the white path through the grass
where I am already going on alone.
you lie there whistling in your sleep.
How can you have broken my heart,
made it a girl again, brimming with want,
waiting for every wind to blow up rescue?
This girl’s heart is no good to me.
The back of my hand lying in the sun
says it has been here a while; the skin
browns and furrows; there’s a callous
on my middle finger, bent with clutching
a pencil since grade school,
and beneath the third knuckle a scar
hunches like a white worm
across the ropey vein. I could do
the whole damn inventory. And you,
with your hair standing straight out
beside your ears, turning your head
in dream, how should it be you to take me
out of myself? Looking into death again
in some woman’s eyes. . . While I sit
gazing down the white path through the grass
where I am already going on alone.
