ten nights

Photo credit: KT Langley Photography

I.        At night I feel a pull
or a  push, like we say in therapy
though I don’t push you anymore
and you don’t sit down, your hands
cupped to your eyes like blinders
on a mad horse

At night I take two
after dinner with water
my therapist says add three breaths
I write on the label
& four unanswered calls

with night in my head swimming
I think of the folds in the mountains
and the veinous starspread between them
both of which hide you
away from me

II. You didn’t have to tell the others
what I asked you that night on the bridge
above black water.
I shouldn’t have said it.  The moon makes me crazy.

the garish morning light revealed
your mouth wound tight like a scar
you wore the face of my doctor
I told you both to forget
what I asked.
Neither of you will.

III. I push because I know
there is always a crack in you that sighs and gives
like wet earth, like a purple wound
that puckers like railroad tracks
like a finger pressed
between two lips.

IV. I want to ask you something
I can’t ask the others
Here you are
sensitive to my anxious swelling:
a pocket of snow
when I am a needle
forgive me,
as I am so often a needle

V.       My arms are wrapped in white moth wings
I am pale and delectable
I would swallow myself
if I could.
In a way, I do.

VI.     I think of that night like a song:
roiling, reddening, bursting, draining
you worked together to close me
I didn’t want the others there.
Sometimes you are the needle.

VII.    Howling is just the way we sing to the moon
Poetic, you said, but you were changing the locks
and I needed help.
I proved you right night after night. I’m sorry that I did.

VIII.   I write a poem
about dark waters
that surge and swell
beneath skin,
spiking toward the moon
her gossamer fingers stretching
to loop around my wrists.
I cut her away.

IX.     You always loved me better blue
than red. That never stopped me.

 X. I drove to your house one night but you weren’t home
I left a bottle of wine on the wood pile and got on the roof.
It was very cold. I rolled a smoke and laid there for hours.
The moon was enormous. She didn’t notice me.
I remembered a good poem by Robert Frost.
I howled.