on the electrodynamics of moving bodies

 

the sheets fold you up carefully, cleanly, and you rattle and shiver

inside them, like a packet of dry garden seeds. in the scrubbing light, the

tulips on the bedside table turn toward you, their lips smeared sloppily

and red, like children experimenting with their mothers' make-up. i sit

beside you in silence and i remember. i sit in the cool, late winter silence –

the stamens of light through the windows pure and untouched and at peace,

and the nurses quiet and attending, their hands smoothing, their

heels clicking.

 

snatch and slink of the trumpets, the hot august dancefloor breathing in and out

under our feet and you, you, smelling like lilacs and sweat, and your smile peeled

and undiminished. outside, the moon tilts its head and smiles thinly, like those old portraits

of weak-chinned, urn-bodied women with high, unwrinkled foreheads

and breakable hands. the people around us swell, spit valves

open, and that crazy, skinny upright bass player with his cool blue skin grows

his notes in the gloom – moist and gagging as greenhouse flowers.

 

we tremble, shake – so many moving parts. the bed swallows you up, your

breath tiny and instant, like snow melting on skin. your hair is white and ghostly,

hands knobbed and bent, curling and spotted like gourds. they seem to have

taken everything from you but your smell – the smell of the late afternoon

just before it rains and of rising dough. an invasive vineyard of tubes run up

and down your body, through your nostrils, and your eyes trace lazily beneath

lashless eyelids.

 

moonlight is caught in between the sheets, like pressed flowers in between the pages

of old books and i watch the sloped hypotenuse of your shoulders rise and fall.

your dreams populate the night – sticky wallflowers – and the brainwashed

idiot moon looks in on us. i love

how your lips part in the night, in sleep,

and the measured

kites of your breath. we sweat in the night, humid shadows clinging to us like bats

and i touch you very

softly.

 

you do not wake up,

but I could sit beside you until I dissolve away, like some

stranded jellyfish. it is night-time and the fog cuddles in like a child

climbing into bed with its parents during a thunderstorm and the

streetlights yellow and gulp and lean in toward each other for warmth. frost

withers the windowpanes. you breathe – the doctor comes in and

looks at us and then goes away and he leaves the room

emptier than before.

 

you are wearing one of my sweaters on the beach – the seagulls flocking

in their nunneries and the sting of the cold salt spray. we sit crosslegged in a tepee

of femured driftwood built before us by teenagers and littered with cigarette butts

and we whisper to each other.

 

the tulips watch you

like landlocked sailors watching the horizon.

 

we see each other from across the street.

 

your fingers tighten

around mine.