after Sappho, fragment 16
When I look at him and feel under my ribs
a Sukhoi T-50 performing a Pugachev’s Cobra
no longer as an evasive maneuver
but for the thrilling thrust-vector stomach plunge,
and my limbic system’s an alembic
distilling chilled champagne from rocket fuel,
and my gray hairs are the smoke off ships
whose burning all night bloodied the eastern sky
before dawn doused their charcoal spars
in cold light, whitening his beard with ash,
and in the flotsam washed to the beach
we find a ring, a feather, a key, a watch,
then twenty years collapse like a star;
we’re children, giggling again at the altar.
The night I knew That one
Hackles up I snapped at his throat hot bark I
could not swallow unkenneled self
gone feral my words all canine and carnassial
And him raising against me finally
one eyebrow turning away on his pillow leaving
me licking my salt and singular fury
Cheek pressed to drain below the pissing
shower for hours I lay gutted by the cool
blade of his refusal even to enter the fray
That one. All night an army of ships
of horses an army of men on foot marched
through me And him unarmed unharmed
on the black earth sleeping