Pitch
I fear for us: the women who talk
in the immediate moments following
sex, as though the act has silently settled
some two-bodied question, who begin
making plans for our presumed futures,
now cast in a cinematic new mold
by the creature below or beside us,
the phantom with whom
we fled daylight.
Even after several nights or minutes
or months of it. Lulled as we are, noble
as we are to keep being droned into a lull,
by the same set of unconvincing circumstances,
certain that we could not be
so gripped if someone somewhere
wasn’t intentionally tightening
their hold.
Don’t we know by now that
is when they humiliate you? In their
kindness, in their empathy for the fledgling
far across the room from them, lodged
in us like a sunken piece of old
metal. When the bed is tellingly
dim, our skin, as an extension of its
warmth, desires the warmth of another,
like a flesh-draped magnet, a current
experimenting with various conductors,
demanding that what touched once
should now logically touch forever.
That is when they sit
in brighter light than us, higher up
than we’ve ever been, manipulate
with tiny movements all the thousand tides
in our bodies, that previously moved
whimsically, dragging in and out
of the sea what floating pieces
it was inspired in an instant to touch.
Of a sudden there is a moon in the pitch
sky and the travelers are free by the disloyal light
to determine their own course. This moment:
the eyelashes, the forearms, bellies so recently
laborers striving for the same perfection,
each stiffens in its turn, and explains
wordlessly that we knew all, all along,
that daylight can puncture ghosts, and must
puncture what it can, so I say now
nothing, have trained
that feral pet to stay still when I have the urge,
like other women, to hope that I can naturally
associate one affection with another, taller
one, leave the human in the animal screaming
like a baby is taught not to cry
by being abandoned in the crib
and its father’s heart follows in pity,
but he refuses to inflict further harm
by holding it.
