Backwards Trajectory

The dark, always an undemanding host, 
fell over the room 
like strips of gauze. 
It blurred your features into smoke. 
When morning comes
you may no longer look like anyone at all. 
The bedsheets melted slowly into the snow, 
the wallpaper peeled away steadily from the night. 
There was the lamp, delighted to be needed,
telling me the window was not so lonely after all. 
I closed my eyes, your face easing into focus,
and wondered what the house looked like with both of us inside.

“If we’d stayed together we’d be like them.”

We were both looking at the couple in the empty space between the jacked up Silverado and shiny Prius. 

We only saw eye to eye with our clothes off, but on this Sunday afternoon in the CVS  parking lot we recognized the ritual we’d eavesdropped into. 

Backpacks, sleeping bags, two stringy haired toddlers. The woman oozed seduction in her distressed straight cigarette jeans and tight white tee. Still in his Carhartts he looked as if he’d been drinking since he punched out on Friday. 

“Well at least we’d have something between us.”

It’s been a year. She hugs her dog as she cries. Someone sings about sitting on the dock of a bay,
wasting time. How much time was wasted with her mom. A whole year gone now. Sometimes it
feels like yesterday. Sometimes it feels like seven years have passed. But life goes on. It has to.
Dad works his 9-to-5 job at the age of 75. Her brother finds houses to list, even in a troubled
market. Her husband is in another state, teaching others. She needs to get tires for her car. The
eclipse is today. Mom’s still gone.

oh,
the time we
spend
blindly in
orbit with our
selves
when
wherever we are,
just down the
hall, a
skeletwin twists
in
the stillness.

We have a living room type of loving,

a green sofa with big open arms

hugging our bodies closer,

two floating spheres of feelings levitating above our lips,

with every kiss,

sinking further into the warmth of our mouths,

mutating themselves to pink raspberries,

I am taking small bites from that future,

tasting it with an animalistic sense of inevitability,

and the sweetness

molding into a new form,

melting like soft soy candle wax,

underneath the blues

and the jazzy artificial lights.

My Sunday type of love, slow and sexy,

without words you are saying 

“Baby I get it”.

to whoever finds the damn T.V. remote-
found wedged impossibly between
the cushioned cracks of a worn
pleather couch. Five bucks to whoever
will bring me my damn purse-
a faux Gucci bag, worth less than
the price of its discovery, found
forgotten on the sticky leather
in a hot, unlocked car. Five bucks
to whoever mows the damn lawn-
whose green blades stretch impulsively
upwards only to be cut down, their lives
lost and found in a measly five bucks.

If I can only get through this plate of mussels and snails
Crack the lobster tails
If I can only run a few more miles to the finish line

That would be a sign
a symbol, a semiology
a secret scribble
If either of us could remember an orgasm
That bird nest full of eggs
The play-off game
The perfect paragraph
The story of me, Ken
Beginning, middle, end.

First love, is it
first love if the window
is orange and we both
are disappointed
making out after music class for twelve hours
adagio. I place my hands on your sweater and
step into snow.

Phil predicts an early spring. They tell me it’s a foolish ritual; a rodent can’t predict the
weather. But who can? I didn’t know I’d move from one apartment to the next, leaving behind
puke-green TV dinners bought on tenuous credit and people telling me to pick myself up by the
bootstraps, while bosses talked about streamlining, budgets, fake regret.
I look out the window. Snow still covers the ground, tree branches naked and tender. But
there’s a patch or two of brown. And the moon escapes a cloud, shadows waltzing into my new
room. Perhaps the ice will break completely.