Joseph Millar

I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing into your hair and thinking of nothing. I want to lie down with you under the sails of a wooden sloop and drift away from all of it, our two cars rusting in the parking lot, our families whining like tame geese at feeding time, and all the bosses of the earth cursing the traffic in the morning haze. They will telephone each other from their sofas and glass desks, with no idea where we could be, unable to picture the dark throat of the saxophone playing upriver, or the fire we gather between us on this fantail of dusty light, having stolen a truckload of roses and thrown them into the sea.

Even the bosses are sleeping late in the dusty light of September. The parking lot’s empty and no one cares. No one unloads a ladder, steps on the gas or starts up the big machines in the shop, sanding and grinding, cutting and binding. No one lays a flat bead of flux over a metal seam or lowers the steel forks from a tailgate. Shadows gather inside the sleeve of the empty thermos beside the sink, the bells go still by the channel buoy, the wind lies down in the west, the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines turning a little, this way and that.

For Annie You can come to me in the evening, with the fingers of former lovers fastened in your hair and their ghost lips opening over your body, They can be philosophers or musicians in long coats and colored shoes and they can be smarter than I am, whispering to each other when they look at us. You can come walking toward my window after dusk when I can’t see past the lamplight in the glass, when the chipped plates rattle on the counter and the cinders dance on the cross-ties under the wheels of southbound freights. Bring children if you want, and the long wounds of sisters branching away behind you toward the sea. Bring your mother’s tense distracted face and the shoulders of plane mechanics slumped in the Naugahyde booths of the airport diner, waiting for you to bring their eggs. I’ll bring all the bottles of gin I drank by myself and my cracked mouth opened partway as I slept in the back of my blue Impala dreaming of spiders. I won’t forget the lines running deeply in the cheeks of the Polish landlady who wouldn’t let the cops upstairs, the missing ring finger of the machinist from Spenard whose money I stole after he passed out to go downtown in a cab and look for whores, or the trembling lower jaw of my son, watching me back my motorcycle from his mother’s driveway one last time, the ribbons and cone-shaped birthday hats scattered on the lawn, the rain coming down like broken glass. We’ll go out under the stars and sit together on the ground and there will be enough to eat for everybody. They can sleep on my couches and rug, and the next day I’ll go to work, stepping easily across the scaffolding, feeding the cable gently into the new pipes on the roof, and dreaming like St Francis of the still dark rocks that disappear under the morning tide, only to climb back into the light, sea-rimed, salt-blotched, their patched webs of algae blazing with flies in the sun.