Evening

Sex and the smell of lilies
or peonies, lurid blossoms hanging heavily obsene
in the twilight.
Your skirt riding high
over white thighs.
Bixies pedal furious
bat patterns.

Ten o'clock, and nothing calls
like bed and a cool home
full of silence.

Nothing like a warm drum,
a stoned drum,
an easy fuck between laundered sheets
and memories of the lavender
I keep forgetting to plant.
Was there ever such a thing as an easy fuck?

Across the Sheet

That fiercely empty
half bed and belly
where a man or child should lie are sharply hollow
and full of secrets.

Too far from the wall, the bed's too wide;
its distance makes my foetal
curl unable to cross
between myself and the destiny bred in my womb.
Girl-woman, turned on herself away
from the bare cold of a night
when the others are burning midnight oil for music,
when even the weight of a guitar on her belly
would be better than nothing at all.

Far Poles

Melancholy at canvas at two in the morning, will I hope desperately in vain for the creak of floorboards from the far end of the house?

i)
There is no greater distance than between the far poles of our house,
I spinning at one,
while at the other you turn in your sleep, unaware,
every drip of pale tinted water a prayer
(if you can believe I'd believe in prayer).

By the time each makes its way undeniably down the canvas
I've lost you all over again.
Calling is to lose you.
How not to want you?

ii)
Is this how we'll be in the spring,
me sitting spinning at my canvas while the earth slowly turns you
irrevocably away
toward morning,
the time of unravelling?
With each day passing, dawn comes sooner.
One morning it will break before me,
before I can make my journey
across the floor,
through the night into sleep.
One day dawn will find me still weaving
spells among my circles.
Will I be turned into stone?

iii)
Knowing you near me is no consolation
when the distance to be crossed
between your door
and I on the floor
is as great as between the earth's far poles.

2AM January

What if
the invisibility on the far side of the glass
contains neither stars,
nor light,
nor the immense density of its absence,
nor any indication that there was once such a thing as an outer
space?

What if there is no far side
of the glass?