It’s snow in summer when she says no.
Not the cold of it but the dark scarf of days
of it. Lightless in wool. Click of leaf—a voice
blinking out and the clouds behind, a quilt’s
guts spilt. She’s rarely here when she’s here
and yet she’s never left. I’m vacuuming
the bedroom and she steps over the cord
to change, dropping her jammies like autumn
leaves, there’s this sucking back that I cannot
escape, swirling in the machine’s contained
cyclone; she’s naked looking for a sock, and
I’ve become vacuum, a wish dusted in memory.
We are bound to our senses even when they
make no sense at all. When the work is done
there will be more work. That’s what I show
the kids every day even though they are
incapable of hearing it inside their growing
orbits. I’m listening to her breaths—4am—
a muddle of desire and dream and those
sounds escaping her mouth glow
like apparitions of song, a tune I know
every note of, its major lifts, its minor falls
and the morning holds us in its dream, or is
it dream holding me inside morning’s ink,
flooding this bed, this odd vessel, my love.
of it. Lightless in wool. Click of leaf—a voice
blinking out and the clouds behind, a quilt’s
guts spilt. She’s rarely here when she’s here
and yet she’s never left. I’m vacuuming
the bedroom and she steps over the cord
to change, dropping her jammies like autumn
leaves, there’s this sucking back that I cannot
escape, swirling in the machine’s contained
cyclone; she’s naked looking for a sock, and
I’ve become vacuum, a wish dusted in memory.
We are bound to our senses even when they
make no sense at all. When the work is done
there will be more work. That’s what I show
the kids every day even though they are
incapable of hearing it inside their growing
orbits. I’m listening to her breaths—4am—
a muddle of desire and dream and those
sounds escaping her mouth glow
like apparitions of song, a tune I know
every note of, its major lifts, its minor falls
and the morning holds us in its dream, or is
it dream holding me inside morning’s ink,
flooding this bed, this odd vessel, my love.