They make love in a closet while we keep their secret,
barely catching each other's eye in crowded conversations.
When we join them again you are all lips
I want to kiss. Desire overwhelms my gentleness.
I hated the world at first for keeping me
from the tender moments. But I’ve grown tired
of obeying the stars and undoing the joys of crossed lovers.
If I ever got reduced to a history, they would say
that I adored you and what stood in the way filled pages
on how we are meant to love love in these desperate days
like we love race cars and recklessness,
how the world has grown ugly enough that we must embrace
whenever we can. Any other belief is a tragedy,
another triumph of separation, two trophies for loneliness.
You have me sit outside the bedroom each morning
as you remove that handful of sacred objects
from the back of your dresser drawer. You have belief
like a little hat, belief packed neatly in two black boxes
I picture you strapping to your forehead and arm –
I will ask one day, are you hoping to press something in
or hold yourself together?
I gaze out the hall window at the street and sky,
listen to the traces of commanded cadence,
what the door does not take from your voice.
It passes my ears like a slow parade in stocking feet
carrying secrets to a destination no one stops to explain to me.
Today we rose late,
revealed what a weak and scuffed up coin the moon is.
The impossibility of trees impresses me more.
Why do they never lie down and sleep?
A swallow darts through their arms,
wings lit from below by the sinking orange
like a scrap of flame that has escaped the wick.
I am too small to possess all I want.
The moon, by comparison, is just a bit of metal,
a bit of reflected light rolling. How utterly, divinely
boring, too large, too slow, slow as a melting glacier.
I begin my own prayer, in the presence of its sad face,
asking the sky like a child, are you there? Listen!
Make me believe or I will know You are no God
of love, and I want nothing to do with You.
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