Wednesday, December 3, 2014

rooms and spoons (i watch you with my fingertips and palm)

rooms and spoons (i watch you with my fingertips and palm)

When I walk into a room
I do not light it up
Fuck
“Demons,” The National

“The kiss had shaken me up so much I couldn’t think straight.
At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness.”
The Strange LibraryHaruki Murakami


(i)

gradually i have learned to hold
bitter tea in my mouth for the cold

my secret Southerner’s rebellion
drinking unsweet tea as denial

(ii)

when i play music for my granddaughter
and sing along to “Graceless” badly

she pauses as only a four-month-old can
just before her dark-eyed smile unhinges me

(iii)

you walk into the room

i am lying on the couch reading MaddAddam
crying so hard tears have pooled on my glasses

but that is not entirely true

you do not walk into the room as i read
those last pages through tears like circus mirrors

(iv)

last night it is the same room
and the same couch where i am reading

about a strange library and a boy
saved from a labyrinth of certain death

by a transparent shape-shifting girl so beautiful
he loses his heart the first time he sees her

it is a sad story about a reading room and loneliness
pinning me to the couch where i cannot talk to you

because the only rooms i have now are ones without you
and like the boy i am rescued and heartless and alone

(v)

i wonder about the two of us
in a room perfectly dark

what the curve of your neck
would look like
to my lips

what my fingertips and palm
would see
across your hip bone

(vi)

spooning in the wake of reading
we talk about the books from the sad library

i collected for you after you left me
stacked and silent and mostly hopeless

i watch you with my fingertips and palm
wishing that this were not yet another dream

(vii)

i have driven to Conyers, Georgia
a place i have never been
but the details are vivid and clear
as if i have been there in real time

you of course are there as you often are
as long as it is a dream and no real room
your disapproving mother watches from nearby
the two of you indifferent as an avalanche

(viii)

i am dust
i am whisper
i am straw

unsweet tea
you did not order

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