Soft Shoulder
“As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep”
—Kenneth Patchen
Harmless, isn’t it, to watch you
raze the room in which you live,
and work, and liked me once
to be in your bed, while the season
changed, about which we were
silent, about which we were not
consulted, the winter moon emerging
as a talisman for all we failed
to do before fall had ended
and now can never do even
for ourselves, let alone each
other. I cannot let you
alone: The body you
are so casual with, dark eyes
in dark settings, like the tarnished
silver band encircling a pristine,
but less valuable, stone.
I wear it
on a severed hand I keep
stowed from sight
in one of my secret pieces
of burdened furniture
laden like an unwilling
mule with other trophies
I have earned in similar performances.
I wear it on any finger.
When I take it swimming
its weight compounds and
offers to drag me to my
relief. There you are,
to my relief, at the foot
of the sea’s bed, terrorizing
monsters and arranging in surfaced
repression waterlogged
knick-knacks. Hapless,
isn’t it, when you sit down
with me to talk unprompted
about feeling stagnant, which
can only be properly observed
by your frustrated shrugs (like
you’re torn between one course
of action and another, and decided
in indecision to settle the matter
on your shoulders.) I wish
that the thousand contrived pieces
of advice I give you—about contentment,
about concession—would somehow
culminate in your mind like
a stumbled-upon jigsaw approaching
completion, and you knew
what I meant without even a hint
of hopeful sex was, please feel better
because I love you
and can stand letting that stagnate
if I know you’re better off far
outside the realm of my admiration.
You reconfigure your room when
I think what you want to do is break
it, like the whole space is defined
as a diorama that you in your
unasked-for genius throw across the
classroom only after you’ve gotten
your “A.”
But if you lapse out of happiness
my discouraged fire for you wonders
what the point is of its containment—
if you, faithless to your universe,
would be no less bothered
than you already are by its
burning. If what you have is not
enough, it says, then for god’s sake
take some of mine. I signed it over to
you already, out of adolescent’s hope
or monogrammed self-immolation,
or the simple pleasure I get
from arranging letters into the shape
of your name. I love to see it there. I love
how its single syllable leans like I rest
heavier on one leg while I wait
like any other tempered pedestrian
for the walk signal at stoplights. You
come in your car, withholding the speed
with which you wish to barrel through all
soft shoulders, do all things, and I knock
on your window to tell you that you’re out
of time, even in the center of the day,
the moon in you that cursed me is already
up and so you have nothing, not me,
not the unmitigated season, still contending
in the race.
