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