dance a piano key & nudge
one eye shut, the winking of the moon
amid your radiance tonight
is too much for me to handle

i can’t sleep without them.
the stars, i mean, not your legs
not the chill of another set of skin
to stretch myself over & let vapor

the heat of friction between want & need,
between around and not so much.
your eyes match your sweater, can i touch
your nether continents? kiss me stupid

or awake, or to bed, let me suckle
your heart valves. i wrote you poetry
on the inside of my ankles, a sonnet
without a volta. sort of unchanging,

my want for you like the steadiness
of my irregular pulse when you get just close
enough to inhale. my want like moonlight,
not illuminating enough down here to show you

Who will remember your fingers?
Their winged life? They flew
With the light in your look.
At the piano, stomping out hits from the forties,
They performed an incidental clowning
Routine of their own, deadpan puppets.
You were only concerned to get them to the keys.
But as you talked, as your eyes signalled
The strobes of your elation,
They flared, flicked balletic aerobatics.
I thought of birds in some tropical sexual
Play of display, leaping and somersaulting,
Doing strange things in the air, and dropping to the dust.
Those dancers of your excess!
With such deft, practical touches—-so accurate.
Thinking their own thoughts caressed like lightning
The lipstick into your mouth corners.

Trim conductors of your expertise,
Cavorting at your typewriter,
Possessed by infant spirit, puckish,
Who, whatever they did, danced or mimed it
In a weightless largesse of espressivo.

I remember your fingers. And your daughter’s
Fingers remember your fingers
In everything they do.
Her fingers obey and honour your fingers,
The Lares and Penates of our house.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

I used an arrow to kill the spider.
I used a steamroller to flatten the worm.

For the ants I called in an air strike.
Bee that found its way in through the screen:

blowtorch.
The mammals were easier—

a bucket of water for submerging the cat,
a poisoned word thrown to the dog.

For love, only a kitchen match. That
and a stove leaking gas

and waiting until the dinner
was good and burned.