Forrest Gander

The first man I went down on. You tasted like well water.
Bushes scandent with white berries.
When you opened my shirt, you took a step back and said, They must envy each other.
The Jammed Log Position.
Broken chevrons of dry mud on the kitchen linoleum. And over newspaper on the table, a heap of freshly picked string beans.
Red-bellied woodpecker claps itself to the crabapple trunk as if a magnet had drawn it. In dreams: that’s how I come to you.
Not seeing the cup in the bathroom, you brought me a mouthful of water in your mouth.
Standing at the window, wrapped in bedsheet, watching bats sip nectar from the clematis.
Sweetest was your imagination.
The way your lips relax when you sleep. And you lose your face, and a boy lies in bed next to me.
Did I wake you? Was I kicking?
A can of linseed oil in the front closet where I made you keep your Redwings.
Dust carving out interiors in the sky at sunset.

And was Coltrane really a pallbearer at Sydney Bechet’s funeral in Paris?
Was that a lie too?
The name of my beloved is Abyss.
The subtlety of your visual attention. You could alert me or change the subject with a contraction of your iris.
Love solves nothing, but your love made me appear to myself.
The Transverse Lute Position.
Each complex tone, a superposition of pure tones.
Someone else will watch me grow old.
The amethystine blue of your eyes, you said once.
If only routine would brush sensation aside.
Then there are doves cooing.
And I am still here.
Who am I to stop going forward? To not even want to heal?
To fail to draw the skin over this wound.

True love, wrote Walter Raleigh, is a durable fire in mind.
But how can I find you in that stupendous blaze?
Come here, you whispered, pulling me through the back door. I was raking leaves from the raspberries and found a nest of spring salamanders.
Face in the mirror crumpled by grief.
Sweetest was your intimate impulse.
For my birthday you gave me a stick with the dry foam cloud of a praying mantis eggsack attached to it.
What bothers me, I told you in the first weeks after we met, is that I never know when you think I’m interesting.
Now, you said. When you say things like that.
The empty nail in the wall by the backdoor where you hung your tattered duckcloth jacket.
The silence of the house has intensified. What woke me last night were snails scraping up the window glass.
The Fetching Fire Behind the Hill Position.
I’m gagging on the hours.

In every photograph, your soul has exited from your face.
The obscenity of hair in the brush buried in your drawer in the bathroom cabinet.
Besame mucho. You laughed, It doesn’t just mean kiss.
Stubbing your shoulder against the door frame.
To say that after you died, I kept breathing. That weeks went by, that I ate meals, looked at a newspaper, slept in a bed with my head on the pillow. That I smiled at someone responsively. That I acted as though.
Can you see how the primroses have grown through the fence?
Contrary to what they tell me, my return to ordinary life is neither stepwise nor slow. There is no return.
Sweetest was the kissing.
And you came back with honeysuckle from the mailbox post. Pinched off the ends and put two, a dark yellow and a white blossom, in each of our coffee cups. Cuts the bitterness, you said.
What made you think you could be left out?
The things you did dazzled me. But you shared them with others. The things you did dazzled others. But you shared them with me.
The yard’s gone Mondrian with primroses, you said.

The Goat and Tree Position.
The rest of us made you the point where our astonishments and our projections converged.
Here’s to life without you.
The sound of leaves falling down through leaves. A night-jar tongue-clicking while I’m too exhausted to sleep.
Try again.
The bushes scandent with white berries.
I’ve been sitting here in a corner of this bar for hours like a blind dog. No one is coming to lead me away. I don’t want to drink. I push a ten-dollar bill to the corner of the table so I can continue to sit.
The light moves away from me.
It doesn’t only mean kiss me a lot, you laughed.
Half a dozen crows mobbing a red-tail hawk. What kind of sign is that? What are you telling me?
Within ten minutes of meeting, we’d exchanged love letters from the corners of our eyes.

Desire, they say, is made of many desires. But my desires are made of one desire.
Staring for an hour at crumbs in the seam of a book.
The hiss of the world against me.
At sunset the doves flock into our oaks and coo. They make so much noise the neighborhood dogs begin to howl.
When you were alive.
Itys, that’s what you named the baby barn-swallow under our porch eve.
How gently you would open and close the door not to alarm the mother bird.
And would not let me turn on the porch light that spring.
The pizza boy saying, I couldn’t find your house.
In the bucket of your mouth you brought me water.
Each day, your death is woven into fact and each night, I let out the knots.
I’m glad you never watched the light in my eyes glint out.
The smoke blown away and then sucked back into the fire.
Was I kicking? I thought I felt a baby kicking.

When I drive back to our rent house, dead leaves blowing against the fence.
Ages ago. Last year.
I brushed on nipple rouge this morning.
In the evening I scrubbed it off.
Devour me.
You said, Two men are inside me. Remember the other one. The one who did not do this to you.
Like a dog is ripping my throat out.
The name of my beloved is Irrecuperable. Liar.
The pendulum swinging stably in space while under it, the floor is carried around by the earth’s rotation.
Yesterday the snow came, bearing no message.
The wooden chair on which you sat at your desk.
Who was it that ravished me? That ravaged me?
Your thumb stroking the nape of my neck.
The membrane separating me from oblivion has ruptured.

How could you betray yourself like that.
Like that.
When the mower hits the mint.
They are wrong who tell me otherwise. It will not be all right.
That mentholated C flat of your laugh. Its intervallic swoop into the upper registers,
your eyes closed. Tearing.
You laughed like a rollercoaster.
A downy woodpecker eyes me at the window. Each illumination, another kind of shadow.
As if the light—
A photograph of you that I pour over looking for clues to what will happen.
What happened?
Can you whisper it to me or have you fallen asleep?
One last breath leaving the circle of your teeth.
Purgatory this place, and I, a wraith wandering lost.
Still walking in my socks around the house as though I wouldn’t wake you.

Carrying the unbearably heavy last words I said to you.
As I’m going under.
Purgatory this place.
As if the light had stopped in the air.