Our second spring, rowan unfurls at the foot of the chapel.
I reach for him, a trucker motel in one of the Carolinas—
this uncomplicated matter, these competing pleasures,
this Phidian bust of the three-dimensional common man.
Remember who broke me in and made it so I could not love.
Take off your hat, king of the beasts.
For him I am an artist who would rather be loved,
be the lips he silenced in a painting, sin’s rib,
the chimneys he gorged with smoke.
If there is a moon on that planet breaking
like ours does from the idea of paradise, it is a religion
we wrote to stay awake at the beginning of time.
If he prefers, I am a dog with my master,
a word we do not use anymore. We are a lost language:
I am a porno in a private tab, or I am a woman and he
is anything,
this forgery of life we make, he is a fish hook
and a museum of human need.
But there is the problem of children:
like bad art they cry out to be loved.
The problem of the newborn in the St. Jude’s sink,
rinsed of the insides of the woman he knocked up.
At dawn, already in Arkansas
I give him road head, aching of sun.
The tired whore; she too is mystified
by the distance men need in their love.