& maybe I stare at the blue veins around your eyes,
sickened by the marriage crisis, onset of a freeze.

Maybe we’ve fucked once in the bed in the house
we’ve occupied for nearly six months.

The origin of rage in twisted lips.
The feeling of power on a grinding jaw,

& a wish for death’s as
beautiful as my own heaven,

this fury that leans against
the time that beckons our lives.

Are dismembered histories testimony
to the absence of desire to live?

Maybe we’re a moon beside the unconscious.
Maybe loons in early morning, wings

ancient branches-- wide
& steady-- in the wind.

Maybe it’s not so sad to say we wake
to an autistic music, this ripe & mutable world.

When a life too near its surface dies, maybe
love’s a question asked of our human limitations.

*****an earlier version of this poem appeared in The English Record