Not Really

Driven like a nail through brick

stick dark as unstuck mud

on the boot left cleaved on the basement rug

a knife poking through a pumpkin

something like breath, a drachma unearthed

by a four year old, cloaked,

shivering: hexagonal,

seemingly gorgeous, a dream--

the picture of horse, the faint upward motion

of coin bounced on the pocket's

inside, it climbs without bearing

right or left, thumb coolly caressing

its image for more than ten years--

time passes, as a pear.

In the thinning, subconscious night

light enters the room like a horse's canter.

Not tomorrow but soon I'll teach my students

about nuance, nooks and crannies

like a young child's hands, clenched

and dripping with fudgicle sweat--

meanwhile the child drips, content,

accepting. I used to think that silence

among two people was awful--

not knowing how to move from one end to

another, thinking, then, about sex, attraction,

interlaced eye contact like gradations of

color. I was constantly adrift. Now,

when I think of things and am with someone

who blinks at me like crystalline winter,

which is her laughter, which is, sometimes,

cold, I don't mind silence: it is part of the process,

the coming up with the idea, the forming,

then the coming out with it: firestorm

of I think I love you or we're missing

soap in the bathroom. Transient night

in Washington, D.C., such transience in this town:

we are constantly disappearing, books

being written, only backwards.