I’m not looking for revenge.
I don’t care how you’d look at me now,
or if you even still think of me. I’m certain
of the answer and it brings no feeling. I call
her your name. She looks at me as at an accident.
I insist she’s you. She assures me, no. I tell her
I would have left her anyway, better that she
moved out the weekend I was out of town
visiting my friend in the state hospital.

She grows hostile, asks for the check and tells
me to fuck off. That I don’t understand a thing
about how she feels, or about what she’s gone
through. Moreover, that I’ve got the details
all wrong. She didn’t move out. I did. The U-haul
pulling away as she returned from her weekend
at the lake. I start to think I’m imagining this.
She reminds me that it was I who contrived
our cohabitation. It was I who assumed
that through my gratuitous gestures of love
she would see that I was meant for her. She
says things don’t work this way, and that I
may as well forget about it because if I don’t
want anything, then why am I even asking.
I tell her I thought she was someone else.

Someone got up from the sofa, leaving
a ring of crumbs around
the discernible absence of his derriere.
I say “his” because it’s only been men
around here lately, and not to put too fine
a point on it is usually a good
idea in such cases—what with the lead
market plummeting. So it’s all
crapped out again. The spell she’s woven
has left you complete and dry,
unmistakably vast in your dreary anterooms.
Letters arrive by cable. Cables arrive
by ship. Ships arrive by one of any number
of propulsion systems and the ocean closes
all wounds. You could satisfy
your curiosity by looking, but it’s no longer
very clear what you’re looking for.
The calendars have peeled away like plastic wrap.

Somehow you figure
the situation. It resembles a hanged
man or the Jack of Hearts. Clever is how
you undress it and make for the corner
store before the last light slips from
the sky so quickly as to be almost
unnoticed like pocketing incorrect change,
or parallel parking—concentrate
on simple things: find the center thread
in your fake Persian rug. If it all sounds
like advice, the cleverest way—and you
are clever, aren’t you?—to unleash a solution
involves staking your usual habits
to the dart board and appearing, if not radiant,
at least receptive to a certain glow, and
if not a warm, inviting one, at least
one that won’t project the deer-in-headlights
look you seem only too capable of now.
If not, at least you can take comfort
that advice buys you only a round or two.
So you need not get hung up on it.
So to speak.

Somewhere there’s an orchard
where things have gotten completely
out of control. Spare the details,
they may be necessary later. We keep
them talking, giving a few a generous
hiatus from all the rigmarole
of holiday shopping, taxi cabs, and pleasure cruises.
The others, holding on to what looks like
possible reprieve, become only more eager to spill
their contents. Juice runs down your shirt.
It reads like one more mess in an otherwise
breathtakingly long list of recent failures.
That is, to read that list aloud in one breath
would take that breath away, and others
would surely follow, like Catholics to confession,
never fully absolved because you’re always
forgetting something, begin to feel pressured,
make up something that requires
further elaboration, and before you know it, you’re
wishing you hadn’t poured that juice,
didn’t need it anyway, could have made do
some other way, by now, more retractable.
Your razor blades need changing.

Someday, you’ll look back on all
this and… back
to the grinding stone. It’s no use
to speculate. I’m afraid. The causes
have long since found their resting
place just off the Galapagos Islands.
And the what-may-come-of-it
escorts an alphabet of variables
capable of leaving you speechless
like mimes talking shop. If all this
means what you’ve feared,
Crusoe, remember the journal ended
pages ago and someone else has been
writing this, put that footprint
there you’ve not yet stumbled on
and may never find. For the day is windy,
and the gulls quarter it—
taking their flight towards the bay.

Such are the slopes of these Olympics.
I think there’s laughter in the air. I smell
gasoline. That plane reminds us of one
thing, and I know where it’s going. It’s cooler
up there and darker the farther away
you get. I moved out. She left the state. Freedom
bought on credit, but you never get far
enough. A voice over the loudspeaker
announces arrivals/departures.
Enter the real thing: after your girlfriend left,
I lifted your shirt, kissed your nipples,
and asked if my mouth is as soft as hers.
You lay there, poker-faced, and said,
It’s what we do when we’re waiting
that makes up who we are. I rolled you
onto your belly. Your moans turned to laughter
and after I came you comforted me.
Later, stopped in traffic I told my friend
Josh how you acted like nothing
was happening. When my ex- (see above)
likened me to a Serbian war-
criminal I thought of that time you
handed me a complex of cells as
evidence of what each month bears and
would I like that. “Gosh no,” I probably
said, having so little idea
I didn’t even care to pretend.
Most of the time I’m just some drip walking
with his thumb hitched up his ass. The rest
of the time I’m a quivering boy,
cowering in the corner of a
department store
                           while the world screams. Jet
streams black out the sky like government
documents. You’re coming and going
always in one place or another
and I know it would never have worked,
sure as I know the car I’m waiting for
will be fixed in another hour and
my father will pick me up from the garage,
where men covered in grease wipe their hands
with red shop rags and approach me
with answers. I’m waiting for the hours
to pass between the life I’ve tried to kill
and the life I’m trying to give birth to.
My father’s waiting for his mother to die.
His mother is waiting for Moby Dick.
The woman next to me waits for her car,
several cars wait at the stoplight.
There are parts in a play that never
get written. This is one of those parts.