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 Library, Haruki 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