Wire in the Blood

These are things only I can tell you.

The shape of your arms, for example,
carving through water, while behind you
the tangled seaweed of your black hair
shows you are drowning.

In this way I am selfish and have always been.
My passion, my desire, my fulfillment.
Not, as you recall, your privacy, your
childhood, which I raped
mercilessly, time and again,
looking for clues of you in a past you could not photograph.

Or, if you are musical, you know
phrasing can change with a breath.

What you do not know is that punishment is not limited
merely to a physical form; it may assume a guise
of phoenix-gold, though beneath its plumage is ash.
The fickle mind trades for comfortable peace, yielding up
the bounty of its ocean: the drowned-dead, the groping hands,
the clipped angels strung by wire to the walls.
And a voice behind me rambles on and on
about the skeletal branches of trees, the coming noxious New York spring,
and the electric power of the third rail.

I am told this is the good place,
where the cliff's edge seems to recede,
but the words begin to fail. What I have lost over the years
is not the stalking Darkness with its hobnailed boots,
but the slipshod ghost of Sympathy that used to wander these halls.
Oh, she puts in appearances, here & there, when least expected, or
so I am told.
Meanwhile her stepsister Pretense, rail-thin and meek,
has since grown fat and strong.

(In this case time is retrospection.
Darkness is the proper noun for the collection of demons I sow,
like wild oats in the thick night, when I deem it right.
Sympathy is what she has always been.
And Pretense is not her stepsister but, more horrible still,
her mother.)

Lithium.
Ativan.
Haldol.
Halcyon.
The last is a phoenix, and the first
possibly that phoenix's name.

You. You were the one
in the orange shirt and black glasses
that compressed your eyes into squares. I dreamt
your eyes would be beautiful and large without them, because
your name is an estate. I was the girl with the timid face,
the chewed mouth. I sat behind you.
For two long hours I considered stabbing you,
right above your clavicles where
bones and blood celebrate the long column of breath.

At a point in the upper arm the blood
beats with such force
that, if ruptured, a man will expire in two minutes.
It quickens my pulse, that.

So it is also with the image of that young man,
boylike in his sedate posturing
bent broken over the hood of a car,
his mangled face in the burst windshield.
Even now I can recall how long his back seemed
taken against the inviting nature of his left hip,
which flirted with the viewer, asking only
for one last handhold before we go.

The thing I need to know from you is how long it will take
before burning hounds appear on the roads again
and the elevators fill with blood
and my nose recalls the damp smell of lime
and every night, mercifully, we all cease--