Salvage one -

He wanted to reach through her skin,
to massage her heart.
Just that, his fingers in her chest and her face turning up
in recognition.
He wanted to remind her
that if he could choose his blood
it would be hers;
they would be sibling.
He thought, mistakenly as men are,
that this would be a good.

“Forget it,” she said in the voice that trapped
like molten lead on moving moths,
“I want you drunk, frightened, all needy.
Needy of me,
only me.
When I hunt you,
you will have no control. No effect.”

He stepped. He knew that she marked time
not by leaves,
not by clock hands,
not by dawns,
because those things were cyclical.
Like the patterns of clouds on the ground,
she would not return.

“I am your dream,” she continued in the voice
of cashmere and rose thorns.
Now he wanted
to leave the boxy wooden room,
to find the rusting iron ties on the tracks outside the window
and drive them further earthward,
down, wet, down,
forcing himself awake.

“So,” he said. And it was his voice..
Exquisite weakness. And he touched her.
She was no longer like ghosts on phone lines.
Moons and grass could rise and fall.
She would simply
be.





GLS
10.12.92